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INTRODUCTION TO THE 
STUDY OF FOREIGN MISSIONS 



Being Chapters I, II, VII, VIII, IX 
of Modern Missions in the East 



BY 



EDWARD A. LAWRENCE, D.D. 



NEW YORK 

STUDENT VOLUNTEER MOVEMENT 

FOR FOREIGN MISSIONS 

1901 



THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cor, to Received 

SEP. 14 1901 

CoPVRtfiHT ENTRY 

CLASS OsKXc. No. 
COPY B. 



W 



A* 



Copyright, 1894, by HARPER BROTHERS 
Copyright, 1901, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
Copyright, 1901, by FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

The original and sole Master Missionary is our 
Lord Jesus Christ, and as Lord of his kingdom he has 
put his own divine commission upon his followers. It 
is " Come ! " " Go ! " two commands in one. " Come, 
learn of me ! " " Go, preach the gospel ! " His first 
command to his disciples was, " Follow me, and I will 
make you fishers of men " ; his last, " Go ye and make 
disciples of all the nations. ,, Discipleship and apostle- 
ship are one and inseparable. The instinct of true 
Christian life 'is everywhere the same. We learn but 
to teach ; we know of Jesus but to tell of Jesus. We 
commune with him but to communicate him. Even so 
are we sent as he has been sent. The commission is 
identical ; and it is in virtue of that final command and 
according to our fulfilment of it that we are to experi- 
ence his fulfilment of the final promise, a promise 
made to a militant missionary church, not to one that 
is at ease in Zion. Just so far as his church accepts 
her responsibility for teaching all nations to observe 
all things whatsoever he has commanded her may she 
expect to hear the voice of him to whom all authority 
has been given in heaven and on earth, saying, " Lo, 
I am with you always, even to the end of the world." 

Thus the church is a coin of divine minting. One 
side shows the likeness of its Lord, the other the map 
of the world. Both devices are so indelibly stamped 
into the metal that to mar either harms the coin, to 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

efface either destroys it. The world is itself to be 
finally shaped into that divine likeness. Thus, Christ 
is at once Authority and Pattern, Inspirer and Organ- 
izer, Author and End of missions. Apart from him 
we can do nothing. Through him we can do, and 
teach all men to do, all things which he has com- 
manded us. 

Not only, then, is the Bible, in such a sublime sense 
as is just dawning upon us, the Mission Book of the 
World, the New Testament being the grammar of mis- 
sions, but Christ has constituted every Christian a mis- 
sionary, Christianity a mission religion, the church the 
great missionary institute. Such is the divine idea. 
What now has been the fact in realization of that 
idea? 

We interrogate history, which is not merely, as has 
been well said, " an excellent cordial for drooping 
courage," but is also a rod for presumption and a staff 
for inquiry. 

When we ask what place in the history of the church 
has Providence given to missions, we notice first the 
continuity of missions. We distinguish certain grand 
mission epochs, and are apt to infer that these com- 
prise the whole of mission history. But missions are 
no modern discovery, or rediscovery of what was lost 
in the fourth or the ninth century. There have been 
flood and ebb of the tide, alternations of enthusiasm 
and lassitude, of zeal and apathy, of conquest and ap- 
parent defeat. There have been times of forgetful- 
ness, stagnation, corruption. Many false methods 
have been employed for the enlargement of Christen- 
dom. The spirit of missions, which is the spirit of 
Christ, has been debased with the lust of power, or the 
lust of gold, or the lust of blood. The serpent's trail 
is seen all over the sacred path. The church, in its 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

corporate capacity, has often done nothing or else has 
done all amiss. Yet the golden thread has not been 
broken, the prophecy has not failed. The sway which 
Christianity exercises in the world to-day is the result 
of over eighteen centuries of continuous effort and 
achievement. It may well be questioned whether there 
has ever been a time since that world-wide commission 
was first given when its appeal has ceased to ring 
in the ears and find response in the hearts of some of 
Christ's followers, when at least individual members 
of the church have not been planning or winning fresh 
conquests for him. 

It is certainly true, in the words of Dr. Maclear, that 
" you can point to no critical epoch since the founda- 
tion of the church — whether it was the downfall of 
the Roman Empire, or the incoming of the new races, 
or their settlement in their new homes, or the bursting 
upon Europe of the sea-rovers from the north, or the 
moving of the Slavonic races to their present localities, 
or the discovery of the New World, or the present age, 
during which science has given to the political organ- 
ism a new circulation, which is steam, and a new nerv- 
ous system, which is electricity — when the spirit of 
missionary enthusiasm has not been rekindled just at 
the juncture when it was most needed." Precisely this 
was the anticipation of Jesus. " This gospel of the 
kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a wit- 
ness unto all the nations, and then shall come the end." 
He announces a continuity of efforts. So far from 
apprehending that the removal of his bodily presence 
will interrupt or impede the progress of his kingdom, 
he allows its universal aim to date from that event, and 
looking from Olivet around on all nations and down 
through all ages, " he claims with an absolute assur- 
ance the rise of a succession of heralds, who shall 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 



carry on a task hitherto unknown — the continuous 
proclamation of his gospel till the end of time." 

The vision has been fulfilled. From that day to this, 
with whatever exceptional interruptions, with what- 
ever grievous perversions, a continual succession of 
men has gone forth from the church into the world, 
intent on the propagation of the faith, and the spread 
of the kingdom of Christ. There can be no question 
that in every one of these nineteen Christian centuries 
mission work in some form or other has been going 
on. We cannot always trace it directly, but we can 
see its results. The second and third centuries are 
covered with dense darkness, so far as the records go, 
but none were more intensely missionary. From that 
time on to the present, every century, I think, without 
exception, shows conspicuous names engaged in this 
work. These are some of them : 



Fourth century . . . Ulf ilas. 


Fifth 


' St. Patrick. 


Sixth 


' .... Columba. 


Seventh 


' .... Augustine. 


Eighth 


1 .... Boniface. 


Ninth 


■ .... Ansgar. 


Tenth 


' ... .Vladimir. 


Eleventh 


' .... St. Stephen of Hungary 


Twelfth 


' .... Bishop Otto of Bamberg 


Thirteenth ' 


' .... Raymond Lull. 


Fourteenth 


1 ... .John de Monte Corvino. 


Fifteenth 


' .... Las Casas. 


Sixteenth 


' .... Francis Xavier. 


Seventeenth 


' ... .John Eliot. 


Eighteenth 


' .... Carey. 


Nineteenth ' 


' ... .Judson. 



But these are a few names out of hundreds known to 

4 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

us. And those are but a few out of tens of thousands 
known to the recording angel who in every century 
have braved peril and endured hardship that they 
might spread abroad the gospel. 

" The evidential value of the continuity of the mis- 
sion enterprise," as Dr. Maclear styles it, is something 
not to be lost sight of. If it is an enterprise which has 
never died out, lapsing with the decline only to rise 
with the recovery of the church, then this fact alone 
would not only define its inalienable place in the 
church, but would also declare its significance and 
glory. 

Glance now at the various stages of periods in this 
continuous mission labor. 

The usual division is into Primitive, Mediaeval, and 
Modern; Primitive missions including the Apostolic 
and post-Apostolic, and terminating with the conver- 
sion of the Roman Empire ; Mediaeval missions cover- 
ing the next millennium; Modern missions starting 
from about the time of the Reformation. This divi- 
sion, however, is arbitrary, unwieldy, and inaccurate. 
The Encyclopaedia of Missions makes these divisions : 
The Pentecostal Church, the Apostolic Church, the 
ante-Nicene Church, the Imperial Church, the Feudal 
Church, the Crusading Church, the Colonizing 
Church, the Organized Church. These represent the 
state of the church rather than the stages of missions. 
There is another division by localities : Mediterranean, 
European, Universal. 

The most natural and instructive division, however, 
seems to me that based on nationality. It is the method 
suggested by Jesus himself, " Go teach all nations," 
and outlining the plan of his kingdom's progress, 
" Ye shall be my witnesses both in Jerusalem, and in 
all Judea and Samaria and unto the uttermost parts 

5 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

of the earth." First the sacred city; next the chosen 
people; then the mingling of Jews and Gentiles; 
finally the world with all its nations. Guided by this 
principle, from our later standpoint we see the first 
stages blended, the last divided. We might classify 
them as Imperial, Tribal, Universal. Or more fully: 
I. Romanic; 2. Teutonic; 3. Slavonic; 4. Universal. 
In the last class are to be included all extra European 
missions, whenever or wherever begun. 

Providence in missions appears especially in the two 
factors which are to be found interacting wherever the 
church has done true service for Christ. These are, 
I. Opportunity; 2. Fidelity. The sphere of the former 
is external, of the latter internal. Both are God-given, 
both to be humanly appropriated. God provides the 
opportunity. He inspires the fidelity. The church 
must accept the one as the other. Both must concur, 
though either may precede; the opportunity, as has 
more frequently been the case, stimulating fidelity, or 
fidelity making a way where it does not find a way, 
thus creating its own opportunity. Nothing will better 
prepare one to take a part in the world-wide movement 
of to-day than to trace the working of Providence in 
the history of missions. 

The preparation for the first great opportunity be- 
gan long before the summons to work. Through all 
the patriarchal and prophetic ages Palestine was a 
great training-school for missions. All that while God 
was training his people by seclusion to that purity and 
tenacity of faith which must be the inheritance of a 
religion which would win the world by conquest rather 
than by compromise. At the same time, all along, scat- 
tered hints of the universal destiny of this religion 
were dropped as seeds in the heart of the people, which 
should ripen in the fulness of time. And centuries 

6 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

before this time came we can see God's hand making 
the Gentile world ready. The more we study those 
ages, the more shall we see the truth of the remark 
of the German historian Droysen, " Christianity is the 
point towards which the development of the old pagan 
world moves, from which its history must be compre- 
hended." 

In the ancient civilization, as is the case in lesser 
degree with some of those of Asia to-day, religion 
and life were closely identified. The state ruled over 
both, absorbing the individual, creating its own gods. 
All the relations of life were subject to the state, and 
each separate state was bound up with its own local 
deities. Such compact structures could be shaken 
down only by being shaken in all their parts. And 
how should these rigid systems be overthrown by a 
religion which approached them from a lower level of 
culture, and seemed, in fact, indifferent, if not even 
hostile, to culture; which appealed to the individual, 
in states where personality was swallowed up in patri- 
otism, and claimed a universal and exclusive dominion 
among peoples crystallized into intense and hostile na- 
tionalities, and presided over by jealous tribal divini- 
ties? 

God had his own way of rendering the triumph of 
such a religion possible. He made five casts of his 
hand. With each cast he broke down barriers. With 
each cast he threw out lines into all the earth, which, 
in his own time, he was to draw together into one 
great net that should hold in its meshes the fragments 
of disrupted kingdoms, the floating elements of dis- 
solved nationalities, among which, in this new contact 
and oneness of life, the personal appeal and the uni- 
versal claim could make their way. There were five 
great dispersions. The migrations of the Aryan race 

7 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

began the first or Aryan dispersion. From their prim- 
itive centre, whether in Asia or Northern Europe, they 
pushed themselves out into one after another of what 
were to become the great centres of civilization — into 
India, Persia, Greece, Italy, Gaul, and Russia. The 
affinities of the peoples that sprang up in each of these 
countries were such that it has ever been easy for one 
common life to possess them all. In India to-day one 
feels the latent bond of relationship between the citizen 
of the United States and the Brahman. One after an- 
other the various branches of this great race yield to 
the power of the Universal religion, which, originating 
in the Semitic race, has used the many scattered 
branches of the Aryan race as its vehicles and messen- 
gers in its triumphant progress around the world. 

The second, or Greek dispersion, which had its be- 
ginnings in the nature of that people, was extended by 
the campaigns of Alexander, which were but the pre- 
ludes to the journeys of St. Paul. The conqueror was 
God's hammer to beat down the walls with which the 
Persian Empire had hemmed in the restless, coloniz- 
ing Greeks. Then God scattered these cosmopolitans 
broadcast. Under their predominating influence, 
Alexandria and Antioch became centres of trade and 
letters. Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, the whole section 
lying along the Mediterranean, was Hellenized. Their 
very downfall as a people and subsequent calamities 
dispersed them but the more, and thus broadened their 
influence. Says Dollinger, " The Greek schoolmaster 
everywhere followed the Roman legionary." A new 
set of relations was formed among the crumbling na- 
tionalities, whose members were brought into close 
mental contact through Greek commerce, literature, 
philosophy, and language. That wide-spread classic 
tongue was thus preparing to be the receptacle of 

8 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

Revelation, first in the Septuagint translation, then in 
the original version of the Gospels and Epistles, the 
only books of any of the great religions that have been 
primarily recorded in any other than an Asiatic tongue. 

A third time God flung out his lines afar in the 
Roman dispersion, or distribution. Then in the west, 
as before in the east, kingdoms were broken up, peo- 
ples denationalized, and both east and west men were 
brought into legal and political contact, while their 
roads by land and their ships by sea abolished distance 
and drew men into physical proximity. Two opposite 
processes were going on simultaneously — disorgan- 
ization and reorganization. But while the old pat- 
tern had been provincial, the new was universal. Well 
has Niebuhr said, " The history of every ancient na- 
tion ends in Rome ; the history of every modern nation 
begins in Rome.' , 

It is easy to see how in the Greek and Roman dis- 
persions God had set certain solvent agencies at work, 
which would disintegrate the old structures of pagan 
life. The power of each ancient state was broken, 
the prestige of the local gods was lost. Society was 
emancipated from the dominion of the patriarchal fam- 
ily. The very household was disintegrated to make 
way for personality, liberty, and private property. The 
great cities which succeeded to the ancient states were 
not grand enough nor exclusive enough to absorb the 
patriotism of their citizens. The vast Roman Empire 
was not compact enough to have much hold on the 
loyalty of its subjects. Local religion, first shocked 
by the defeat of its gods, was afterwards corroded by 
Greek philosophy. 

Thus all around the Mediterranean the isolation and 
exclusion which had prevailed were changed to dis- 
persion and concentration. Diversity and hostility 

9 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

were succeeded by uniformity and intercourse. But 
the former pride and glory had been followed by dis- 
content. The old objects of love and worship, on 
which men's passions had been centred, were torn or 
melted away, and nothing had been found to take their 
place. Deep dissatisfaction prevailed. Men's lives 
were empty. They were sick at heart. Brought into 
close contact with one another, they were not united, 
but were at odds with both God and man. The unity 
of the Roman Empire was a mechanical unity, which 
could only hold the fragments of humanity in local and 
legal juxtaposition until the power appeared that 
should fuse them into one common life. What a mar- 
vellous mission field was thus offered to the gospel! 
And what a marvellous Providence had prepared it! 
It is God who tumbles down the pagan walls, it is he 
who melts away the icy barriers with the breath of his 
mouth. He makes the mission roads, and builds the 
mission bridges. And when he calls the mission army 
forth, lo! already he has entered the enemies' camp, 
to make them faint and fear. He worked so then, 
he works so now, in India as in the Roman Empire. 

But there were two more dispersions. The fourth 
was that of the Jews. Not only their Babylonian cap- 
tivity, but, later on, their own growing needs and tastes 
drew them into the movement of the times and scat- 
tered them, as the Jewish Diaspora, throughout the 
civilized world. In the ancient world also Judaism 
was an effective leaven of cosmopolitanism and na- 
tional decomposition. Thus were they the condition, 
not only of the rise of Christianity, but of its incor- 
poration into the heathen world. Their proselytes 
hung as a loose fringe to Judaism. Aroused but not 
fettered by its new truths, these Hellenists were just 
the favorable soil for the gospel seed. Preaching al- 
io 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

most always found its first audiences in the ubiqui- 
tous synagogues and houses of prayer. Every syna- 
gogue was a mission station of monotheism ; and it 
was those who had been lately kindled by the teaching 
of the prophets who most readily accepted the Messiah 
of whom these prophets spoke. 

Finally, with a fifth cast of his hand, God flung the 
Christians out. They were not long permitted to cling 
to the sacred city, but were even driven forth, houses 
falling about their heads, to wander out into all the 
world, often unintentional and unconscious mission- 
aries, witnesses to the truth of the gospel among all 
nations. 

See how God's work is done ! Grain has been gath- 
ered from many distant scattered fields. By conquer- 
ing hoofs it has been ground into meal, by governing 
hands it has been kneaded into one lump, the Roman 
Empire. Now shall the leaven be put into the lump, 
that so at last it may become like unto the kingdom 
of God. Into the shattered, uneasy, inorganic Roman 
world, there is inserted, by the labors of these few 
Christians, the life of one divine Lord, as the supply 
of all their needs, the centre of all their passions and 
affections, through the vitalizing power of which they 
may grow into one people and spread into one glorious 
kingdom. 

I have dwelt at some length on the preparatory work 
of this era, not only because of its intrinsic importance, 
but also because, in the study of the mission work of 
our time, I find myself every day more and more 
referred to that early period, as the type and the key 
to very much that is happening now. And I am con- 
vinced that if any seek to. interpret the opportunity of 
to-day in the vast empires of Asia, they must carefully 
study the way in which God prepared the great apos- 

ii 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

tolic opportunity throughout the Roman Empire. 
Droysen says, " The highest achievement which antiq- 
uity in its own strength has been able to attain is 
the fall of heathenism." Yet we may add that it did 
not do even that. For antiquity had not the strength 
to shatter its own rejected idols. The final blow came 
from the pierced hand. 

The apostolic fidelity needs not to be told. It stands 
recorded in the Acts and Epistles of the apostles. He 
who had created the opportunity and sent his Son, 
sent also the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Thereafter the 
persecuted church, for the first, last, sole time in its 
history, was the great missionary, needing no society 
for propaganda, for it was that itself. There is a mys- 
tery about the origin of many Christian communities, 
such as that of Damascus, Rome, Gaul, and Britain, 
which is explained only in this way. As is to-day 
alleged of the Mohammedans, every convert was a 
missionary. The merchantman, the servant, man or 
maid, the captive hostage or slave, the Christian wife, 
all were true to their opportunity; all carried their 
faith with them, and even through silence proclaimed 
it to the world about them. Yes, the absent and the 
dead did the same work, when the story of the one 
exiled and the other martyred for his faith proved to 
some inquirer the message of salvation. At the 
head of all these were the apostles and their compan- 
ions, who waited for no compulsion to scatter them 
among the dispersed, but went forth like blazing 
torches to set the world on fire with Christian love. 
No sooner had these open doors been entered than the 
second great opportunity came with the irruption and 
distribution of the northern tribes. It was another of 
those great providential migrations of population, of 
which history is full. 

12 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

It came neither too early nor too late. The work of 
Greece, of Rome, of Judea, had been finished; the 
work of Jesus was begun. For four centuries, along 
a frontier of two thousand miles, the Roman and Teu- 
ton faced one another. There was constant contact 
and interchange between Christian Rome and the rude, 
hardy, simple northern tribes. Missionaries like Ulfi- 
las and Severinus wandered forth among them, to 
find their hearts strangely unfettered and unoccupied. 
Captives were taken on both sides. The pagan cap- 
tives learned in Rome, and returned to tell their coun- 
trymen, what they found the Christian captives had 
already been teaching in the wild northern woods. 
Rome's hired legions, too, were constantly ministered 
to by holy men, who brought them, while they fought, 
the message of peace. It is touching to think of 
Bishop Ulfilas, with his Goths, refusing to translate 
for them the four books of Kings, because, forsooth, 
they needed the bit more than the spur. Thus the 
northern hearts were moved before they took Rome, 
till at last they came, they saw, and they were con- 
quered, melting away into Christianity so quietly and 
so swiftly that hardly " a legend or a record remains 
to tell the tale." Here, among these primitive tribes, 
there were traits of personality, independence, and 
obedience, of manhood, and yet more of womanhood, 
which made good soil for the gospel seed. 

Yet it was only an enduring fidelity that mastered 
this opportunity. It took all the fiery zeal of the Celtic 
Church, aided by the organizing power of Augustine 
and the Roman missionaries, on to the close of the 
seventh century to evangelize Britain. Winfred, called 
the father of Christian civilization in Germany, died 
a martyr on the shores of the Zuyder Zee. " Nor," 
says Dr. Maclear, " did his loving disciples and suc- 

13 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

cessors find the work less arduous, less liable to con- 
stant disappointment. The whole of the latter half of 
the eighth century is a record of alternate success and 
defeat. Now a fresh outpost is established, now it 
disappears before a desolating inroad of heathen Sax- 
ons. Now a church is built, now it is levelled with 
the ground by the same remorseless invaders ; nor was 
it till, with indomitable determination, Charlemagne 
had pushed his conquests from the Drimel to the 
Lippe, from the Weser to the Elbe, and thence to the 
shores of the Baltic, that the wild world of the eighth 
century could be lifted out of the slough of barbarism, 
and the civilization work of intrepid missionaries could 
proceed with any real effect." 

There was yet another enlargement of opportunity 
when, after this long struggle with the Celtic, Teu- 
tonic, and Scandinavian tribes, the way was opened 
in the latter half of the ninth century to the Slavonian 
tribes. Here, too, it was only by the same bold, un- 
flagging faithfulness that the gospel won the day. It 
passed quickly from Bulgaria to Moravia, and thence 
to Bohemia and Russia. But in Poland, Lithuania, 
Pomerania, the fight seemed almost hopeless, the op- 
portunity not to exist. It is passing strange to read that 
in a.d. 1230 " human sacrifices were still being offered 
up in Prussia and Lithuania in honor of Potrimpos, 
the god of corn and fruits, and Picullus, the god of 
the nether world; while infanticide was so common 
that all the daughters in a family were frequently put 
to death; serpents and lizards were objects of worship, 
and male and female slaves were burned with the dead 
bodies of their master, together with his horses and 
hounds, hawks and armor." Or, again, how terribly 
confused are Christianity and bloody paganism in the 
account that " when the body of Rolf the Ganger, 

14 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

who had accepted Neustria and Christianity together 
for himself and his Norse followers, was to be buried, 
the gifts of the monasteries for the repose of his soul 
were accompanied by the sacrifice of one hundred 
human victims. " 

Yet the work went on, though serpent worship was 
still prevalent in Lithuania in the fifteenth century, 
and though Lapland was not won until the sixteenth 
or even seventeenth century. It was only constancy, 
devotion unto death, and a continuous pressure of the 
gospel upon the world, that accomplished the evan- 
gelization of Europe, even with all the providential 
preparations, dispersions, and migrations. 

Through it all, God showed that he could preserve 
as well as prepare. Speaking of the tenth century, 
Bishop Lightfoot says : " I can compare the condition 
of the church at this epoch to nothing else but the fate 
of the prisoner in the story, as he awakens to the fact 
that the walls of his iron den are closing in upon him, 
and shudders to think of the inevitable end. From all 
sides the heathen and the infidel were tightening their 
grip upon Christendom. On the north and west the 
pagan Scandinavians hanging about every coast, and 
pouring in at every inlet ; on the east the pagan Hun- 
garians, swarming like locusts, and devastating Eu- 
rope from the Baltic to the Alps; on the south and 
southeast the infidel Saracen, pressing on and on with 
their victorious hosts. It seemed as if every pore of 
life were choked, and Christendom must be stifled and 
smothered in the fatal embrace. But Christendom 
revived, flourished, spread." 

The methods of these mediaeval missions were full 
of instruction, both for imitation and avoidance. 

The missionaries were nearly all monks. They often 
went forth like Christ and his apostles, in companies 

15 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

of twelve, with a thirteenth as leader, and became pio- 
neers of civilization as well as of Christianity, tilling 
the soil and subduing wild nature as well as wild 
hearts. Seven such companies of thirteen are named 
in the sixth and seventh centuries alone. Brother- 
hoods and sisterhoods had flourished among the 
Druids, and before them, and seemed congenial to the 
soil. The communities formed by them were not un- 
like the Christian villages of Southern India, or the 
South Seas, or the Moravian settlements in Greenland 
or South Africa. The monastery was not one great 
building, but a village of huts on a river or island, 
with a church, a common eating-hall, a mill, a hospice! 
and a surrounding wall of earth or stone. Thither 
men came and invited others who could not maintain 
the habits of their new life in heathen homes. Here 
they concentrated their strength. They ploughed and 
fished, felled trees and tended cattle, cared for the 
sick and poor, trained the children and the clergy, 
went out as evangelists, lingered as pastors, returned 
and copied the Scriptures, while they received and pro- 
tected their new converts. Very unlike was this to the 
oriental or modern idea of monastic life. But Iona 
and Lindisfarne seem to have been the type of just 
what was needed for those times. 

Throughout there was a striking absence of ver- 
nacular literature, and great anxiety to retain the Latin 
language for the Scripture and liturgy, though the 
mother tongue was never entirely banished from the 
Anglo-Saxon service. Miracle-plays also took a prom- 
inent part in their worship. Conversions were largely 
national instead of individual, and, as a result, fre- 
quently violent rather than peaceable, and sometimes 
of short duration. In answer to the often-pressed 
command, " Coge entrare " — compel them to enter in 

16 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

— some milder spirits added, " verbis, non verberi- 
bus " — with words, not blows — but it availed little. 
When Clovis, Vladimir, and other savage chieftains 
were converted, there followed the wholesale baptism 
of their tribes. We read, for instance, how Russian 
peasants were driven into the Dnieper by Cossack 
whips, and baptized by force. Norway was converted 
in the tenth and eleventh centuries by the force and 
craft of its kings. It was only the Reformation that 
reached the heart of Norway. Charlemagne fought 
the savage Saxons into the kingdom of God, as well 
as into his own. It was always baptism or battle with 
him and many other Christian chiefs. 

It is not strange, then, that while England was evan- 
gelized in less than a century through the combined 
efforts of the Culdee and Latin churches, yet in vari- 
ous Saxon kingdoms in the south of England there 
was for some time a pretty regular alternation of 
Christianity and heathendom. A heathen king, so the 
process is described, becomes Christian, and forthwith 
all his subjects are Christian. He returns to heathen- 
ism, or dies, and is succeeded by a heathen, and no 
Christians are found. Such is purely national con- 
version. Yet a Scotch writer says : "I doubt whether 
England now sends as many missionaries to all the 
world, as England at the end of the seventh and be- 
ginning of the eighth centuries sent to Frisia alone. 
Certainly from Scotland not as many go out now as 
went from our shores at the beginning of the seventh 
century." 

This wholesale conversion of peoples may be re- 
garded as a kind of national infant baptism, after 
which the baptized were handed over to the instruction 
of the church, i.e., of the clergy, for church meant 
clergy. Even in this way the conversion of Germany 

17 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

was a work of several centuries, from the second to 
the eighth. But northeastern Germany (Prussians 
and Slavs) was heathen until the eleventh and thir- 
teenth. 

A startling interruption to the progress of the gos- 
pel broke in with the rise of Mohammedanism, which 
either extinguished the oriental churches, or depressed 
them into a tolerated insignificance. Already corrupt, 
they were incapable of such a conquest over the infidel 
as the Latin church had won over the pagans. 

Then followed a movement, both in its character 
and its extent among the most remarkable that the 
world has seen. We may not refuse to call the Cru- 
sades a great mission movement, a great mission en- 
thusiasm. However worldly motives may have mingled 
with the zeal of the church, however that zeal may 
have been misdirected and perverted, using the sword 
of the flesh instead of the sword of the Spirit, seeking 
the rescue of the tomb rather than of the faith of its 
Lord, yet it was a true uprising and outrushing of the 
missionary spirit of Christianity. The new life had 
been checked in its expansive work, stripped of its 
sacred places and original seat. It had been threat- 
ened at the very centres of its power. The iron walls 
were contracting with every century. Just because it 
was irrepressibly expansive, and with the instinct that 
it would be slain if it should be stayed, the hemmed-in 
current rose in a flood and dashed itself in fury against 
the opposing walls. Defeat ensued. With all their 
incidental benefits, the Crusades brought no mission 
conquests for Christ. The church was to win its vic- 
tories on other fields, and in different ways. The Cru- 
sades ended in the Inquisition, which, despairing of 
the conversion, sought the compulsion of Moors, Jews, 
and heretics. Yet they may be counted among God's 

18 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

preliminaries. They opened the larger East, made Eu- 
rope more cosmopolitan, prepared the way for Loyola 
and the Jesuits. 

The modern and world-wide opportunity began with 
the discovery of the new West, and the recovery of the 
old East. What a providential coincidence of the men 
and the dates ! Columbus and Vasco da Gama ! Both 
seek the East. But the one sails out to America, the 
other rounds the Cape of Good Hope. Vasco da Gama 
takes up for completion that movement of dominion 
from the West into the East which was begun by 
Alexander and the Romans, attempted by the Crusad- 
ers, and is continued at this present day by the nations 
of Europe; while Columbus inaugurated that move- 
ment of population from the East into the West which 
is at its height in our times. Thus pagan Asia and 
barbarous America were brought at the same time 
close to the heart of Christian Europe. It is another 
of those strange coincidences that even at the time 
when the universal opportunity opened, the men were 
living who were to inspire the church with a new and 
loftier fidelity which should finally prove itself true 
to its responsibility. Within a quarter of a century 
after the sailing of Columbus the Reformation had 
begun. 

The same century, too, which saw the world opened 
wide before the church, saw also a new and marvellous 
instrument for diffusing the truth put into the hands 
of the church ; an instrument which, when applied, did 
more to facilitate her communication with men of all 
classes and tongues than anything which has come to 
man since he first received the gift of speech. I mean 
the art of printing. That simple invention made it 
possible for the Bible to be for the first time in very 
truth the People's Book, and for a Christian literature 

19 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

to leaven all ranks. As the Bible was the first book 
printed, so the press became the basis of our great 
world-wide Bible and Tract Societies. This simple 
instrument gives a more characteristic stamp to mod- 
ern missions, in their difference from all that has pre- 
ceded, than anything else that can be named. 

Closely connected with this, however, as a part of 
the great opportunity in preparation was the revival of 
classic and linguistic studies in the fifteenth and six- 
teenth centuries. It brought the church into nearer 
contact with the original Scriptures, fitted it for the 
acquisition of oriental languages, for appreciating the 
spirit of alien peoples, and for translating the Bible 
into all tongues. 

There was one other force which was needed to 
fully equip the church for its universal activity, and 
to draw the nations of the world together into a net, 
as the peoples of old had been drawn into the Graeco- 
Roman Empire. That was the power of steam, which 
was to bind the lands together with bands of steel, 
turn the oceans into a Mediterranean, make the loco- 
motive an emissary of God's kingdom, and the steamer 
a morning-star to herald the day. That invention was 
not ready to begin its task of annihilating space until 
the dawn of the nineteenth century. But it was ready 
in time, for not until then was the purified church 
itself roused to a fidelity grand enough to undertake 
the work for which God had been preparing this equip- 
ment. It was in 1807, while the young men at Will- 
iamstown were praying and studying about missions, 
that Robert Fulton was making the first trip of the 
Clermont from New York to Albany. 

But the great modern opportunity which opened 
with the sixteenth century was presented to a corrupt 
church, a church not faithful to its Lord. How, then, 

20 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

could It expect to establish his kingdom? Yet in its 
own way that corrupt Latin Church did respond to 
the appeal, and with a spirit that differentiated it at 
once from the degraded oriental churches of the time. 
It proved itself a missionary church. It accepted the 
universal missionary idea. If its mission work had 
almost come to a stand-still in the fourteenth and fif- 
teenth centuries, it has never ceased since. It is true 
that a degenerate church cannot hope to lift men above 
its own level. It is true that these particular missions 
frequently served the Papacy rather than Christ, and 
policy rather than truth; that these mission schemes 
were too often merely auxiliary to the conquering and 
bloody schemes of grasping potentates; that having 
sown corrupt seed, often amid circumstances of horror 
and atrocity, the peoples, who throughout large coun- 
tries and even continents had given a nominal adhesion 
to Christ, had been left in the darkness of brutal igno- 
rance and idolatrous superstitions, the prey of an un- 
educated, tyrannical, and unscrupulous priestocracy. 
No doubt the Roman Church was making strenuous 
endeavors to recoup itself, by its missions, for its losses 
in the Reformation, the Jesuit order being founded 
in 1530, thirteen years after Luther began his work. 

But it is also true that that church did, first of all, 
comprehend the world-dominating destiny of Chris- 
tianity; that through many of its undertakings there 
has run a strain of high and heroic loyalty to Christ ; 
that there are no nobler records of saintly devotion on 
the mission field than those offered by some of its 
emissaries, such as the Jesuits in North America, and 
Xavier and his followers in India, China, and Japan. 
To-day, the self-denying austerity of the Roman Cath- 
olic missionaries is one of the things held up as a re- 
proach to Protestant missions. We may be sure that 

21 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

more souls than we can number have found their way 
to heaven through the missionary labors of Roman 
Catholic priests. 

It is a strange fact that the Reformation which re- 
newed the fidelity of a part of the church to Christ did 
not seem to kindle its zeal for missions. The Bible, 
after being so long shut, was open. There was the 
field. Where were the sowers to sow the seed? The 
reason commonly assigned for this neglect is the fact 
that the Protestant cause was too much occupied in 
struggling, first for bare existence, and then for the 
development of its life, to be able to attempt mission 
work. That is not a valid reason. It did not hinder 
the Apostolic Church from being missionary. We 
should not allow its cogency if applied to any of our 
local churches. Least of all would it account for the ab- 
sence of the mission thought. The truth is that the 
reformers did not even cherish the missionary idea, 
and that they were largely prevented from doing so 
by their being preoccupied with theological controver- 
sies. The church needed to be brought yet nearer its 
Lord, and into fuller comprehension of his plans, be- 
fore it would be equal to the need. 

See now how successive waves of divine influence 
flood the church, and how each lifts it higher out of 
the low-tide mud of selfishness, until it floats free 
and loose in the great ocean of universal love. Ger- 
man pietism, headed by Spener and Francke, gives 
one grand uplift. It was distinctly missionary in its 
character. Francke's plan for his institution at Halle 
was that it should become a universal seminary, where 
youths of all lands should come, where the gospel 
should be taught in all tongues, and whence messen- 
gers should return to evangelize all peoples. It was 
from Halle that the noble originator of Protestant 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

missions to the heathen, the king of Denmark, after 
conference with Francke, in 1705, drew Ziegenbalg 
and Pliitschau forth to the Tranquebar mission in 
India. It was Francke who issued the reports and had 
the control of the work. And it was here that Count 
Zinzendorf received the impulse which made him the 
head of the Moravian Brethren, started in 1722, and 
which to-day is one of the most thoroughly missionary 
churches in the world. For many decades after that, 
it was the land of the Pietists that furnished the men 
for missionary societies of whatever country. Eng- 
land might organize the work and raise the money, 
but for many years the only men willing to go out 
were Germans. 

One more great uplift was needed before the church 
would be free. This came in the revival of Wesley and 
Whitefield. Wesley died in 179 1. It was in the very 
next year that William Carey preached his great mis- 
sion sermon, " Expect great things from God ; attempt 
great things for God " ; a sermon which proved the 
starting-point for the first purely English missionary 
society, and thus really began the era of modern mis- 
sions. One of the strongest influences in preparing 
Carey for this work was a small volume of Jonathan 
Edwards's, published in the middle of the last century. 
That same spirit had wrought in New England, result- 
ing in the consecration out of which, early in this cen- 
tury, sprang our own societies. Thus, at last, the 
times were ripe. The work was there, the men were 
there. With new meaning the church could pray, 
" Thy kingdom come." Yet even when thus floating 
free, it is strange to note the timidity of missionaries 
in launching forth, and the various delays that are 
made before they are willing to heave anchor and away 
to the open sea. 

23 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

The truth is that, with the exception of the Moravi- 
ans, almost all extension of the kingdom of God prior 
to the time of Carey was dependent on the extension 
of earthly kingdoms. The mission enterprise was 
closely connected with political or commercial or ex- 
ploring enterprises. It followed the discoveries or the 
trade or the conquests or the colonies of the leading 
powers. 

First, in modern times, came the supremacy of Spain 
and Portugal, and it was Spanish and Portuguese mis- 
sions that flourished. The founder of the Jesuit order 
was a Spaniard. It was from this centre that various 
orders went forth to take possession of Mexico, Cen- 
tral America, Brazil, Peru, and the West Indies, while 
Portugal planted the church in the East Indies. The 
sixteenth century completed the triumph of the Roman 
Catholic propaganda. For then came the supremacy 
of Greater Holland, as mistress of the seas, and with 
it the spread of her missions to Ceylon, Java, and other 
islands. The sway of Greater Britain succeeded, and 
she and her American daughter have long been leaders 
in missions. The French regime in North America 
was marked by French missions, in the same way. 

Now that Germany, supreme on land, has begun to 
aim at maritime power and is spreading her colonies 
throughout the world, we should expect to see her mis- 
sions expand. Nor is our expectation disappointed, 
for never has the missionary purpose been so strong 
and general in Germany as now. Old societies are 
revived, new societies are formed; Church and State 
alike encourage them; patriotism and philanthropy 
conspire to lend their aid. For it is contact that brings 
the sense both of responsibility and power. Contact is 
the great opportunity. Germany of the Reformation 
had no such contact with the heathen as had Spain, no 

24 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

such foreign development, or it might, too, have been 
a great propagandist. Much depends on the foreign 
spirit of a people, as well as on its Christian spirit. 

Thus in nearly all the movements of modern cen- 
turies, missions, like trade, have followed the flag, 
depending on the state for protection, patronage, and 
propagation, which expected aid the state has often 
freely, if not always wisely, bestowed. They have 
been purely national, often governmental missions. It 
is only the highest consecration that flings itself out 
upon the world, and makes alike its own contact and 
opportunity. The great development of the present 
century has come because the church has at last ceased 
hugging well-known shores, and has put out into the 
broad open sea ; meaning to circumnavigate the globe ; 
abandoning dependence on familiar landmarks; trust- 
ing, at length, to the compass, the midday sun, and the 
Master, who is with us in the ship ; glad of the shelter 
of the flag, wherever it is found flying, but never 
lingering long beneath its shadow. The resources of 
the church are not in any kingdom of this world, but 
in her Lord and herself. 

The Dutch, the English, and the Danish missions 
mark three stages of advance towards this ideal. 
When Holland was first mistress of the seas, she made 
her colonies government missions. The result was 
400,000 government Christians, and perversions end- 
ing the work even faster than conversions had begun 
it. In a little more than one generation after religious 
disabilities were removed, not a single professing 
Christian was to be found as a relic of the Dutch 
missions. 

The English in North America show the second 
stage. The conversion of the Indians was a leading 
aim in emigration. The colonial seal of Massachusetts 

25 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

in 1628 had the device of an Indian upon it, with a 
motto in his mouth, " Come over and help us." John 
Eliot, " the first of the great Protestant missionaries," 
did a wise and noble work among the Indians. But 
he and they all did it as ministers of English congre- 
gations, and their work was connected with and limited 
by the national influence. " The colonial churches, 
brought into contact with pagans, recognized the duty 
of trying to convert them ; but there was as yet no idea 
of making the preaching of the gospel the sole motive 
for entering heathen lands." 

In 1 72 1, Hans Egede sailed from Denmark for 
Greenland with the aim of evangelizing it. His method 
was peculiar, and marks the third stage, or transition 
from government to ecclesiastical missions. He had 
organized a trading company which, under the protec- 
tion of the Danish government, was to join him in 
making a settlement in Greenland; they with the aim 
of establishing the rule of their country there, while 
he established the rule of Christ. " In both objects he 
succeeded," says a writer. " He is alike the apostle of 
Greenland, and the founder of Danish sovereignty in 
it." It was just after this that the Moravian work be- 
gan, and set the whole church an example by sending 
their members, untrammelled by nationalism, into 
every part of the world, " measuring their obligations 
not by the extent of a nation's sway, but by the extent 
of Christ's command." It is the difference between 
converting the negroes who have been brought to the 
United States, and establishing missions in South 
Africa. 

With this century, then, the true universality of the 
mission work was made clear and the work itself prop- 
erly begun. The opportunity, however, has gone on 
enlarging. Captain Cook's voyages and death thrilled 

26 



PROVIDENCE IN MISSIONS 

men with a fresh sense of the breadth and needs of the 
world, and it was the reading of his books which took 
many of the first missionaries to the South Sea 
Islands. The slave-trade led some to Africa. The 
British rule in India led others to that land. 

How full have the last fifty years been of new dis- 
coveries, which have stimulated to fresh endeavors! 
The deciphering of old inscriptions, the recovery of 
lost languages, the disclosure of ancient Scriptures and 
religions, the great geographical and political move- 
ments which have in rapid succession opened India, 
China, Japan, Africa, and Korea to our undertaking! 
The mind is overwhelmed at the display of the Divine 
power and plan, the heart is filled with wonder and 
with awe. Fidelity once awakened and turned into the 
field, the opportunity and fidelity act and react, each 
creating the other. When the first English mission- 
aries went to India, there seemed no room for them. 
They were driven out to the Danish possessions in 
Serampore. But they pressed in upon the country 
until the English people joined them, and broke the 
restricting barrier down. They made their way. Now, 
the great opportunity to reach the women of India and 
of China has come simultaneously with the marvellous 
development of both woman's study and woman's work 
at home. The physicians and the teachers have been 
training here ; lo ! their work is ready for them there. 

God has made great dispersions of peoples before, 
but never so great as now. Steam and electricity are 
vast cosmic forces, pulsing around the globe, distribut- 
ing and reconcentrating all the elements of life with 
marvellous speed and power. These are now the 
agents by which God scatters populations in strange 
parts of the earth, and causes all races to mingle. Emi- 
gration, colonization, exploration, and commerce set 

27 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

everything in motion. These lines God is to draw 
together again into a net, in whose meshes all nations 
of the earth will be found. Our task is to see that 
they are interlaced in a divine confederacy. He is 
flinging Europe into America in the tides of immigra- 
tion; flinging the Chinese among all the isles of the 
sea and into our land by laws which legislation may 
retard but cannot repeal. Then he casts England out 
into India to rule and to teach. He spreads Russia 
over a great part of Asia; scatters the Anglo-Saxon 
people round the world; pushes Europe down on 
Africa, to explore, to rule, and to save or to ruin it. 
Diplomatic connections bind us, where nothing else 
does. We are intertwined in cosmic relations. Our 
duties to mankind press upon us. Have we a fidelity 
to match? 

Nothing can be more plain than that God is bent on 
the conquest of the world. He shapes history in the 
interests of his church. He has mapped out the world 
for his kingdom. We have not to-day to create the 
opportunity. It is here. We have not to draw the 
inspiring presence from afar. He is at our doors. 
All we have to do is to accept the double gift of the 
field and the force and go forth to overcome the world. 



28 



II 

THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

THE MISSION, AIM, SCOPE, MOTIVE, CALL, 
FITNESS, AND FITTING 

Our swift tour through some of the great, central, 
critical mission fields of the world is completed. Like 
a naturalist returning from an exploring cruise, we 
bring back with us a full cargo of specimen mission 
facts. But, as in his case, our labor is only begun. 
It is not enough to dump our load at port and call its 
total bulk the net gain of our trip. Our collected 
facts must be analyzed, classified, labelled, organized. 
Their significance must be found, and, since this is 
a moral sphere, their application must be made. 

In other words, there is a Science of Missions. By 
an inductive study of the facts and experiences of the 
past and present, the near and the remote, it dis- 
covers the underlying principles which pervade the 
whole work. These teachings of experience it com- 
pares with the primal impulse of faith, from which 
the whole proceeds. Assuring itself of their con- 
gruousness and coincidence, it then reaches the illu- 
minated standpoint from which it may resurvey and 
control the work. With ever-growing clearness it 
applies to each detail the principles and methods thus 
suggested by faith and confirmed by experience. The 
mission undertaking becomes an orderly, continuous, 
organized appropriation of the world for the Lord 
Jesus Christ. In this chapter we shall consider such 

29 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

preliminary, fundamental points as the mission aim, 
scope, motive, call, fitness, and fitting. 

What is the aim of Christian missions ? This is the 
clew to the whole thing. The end shapes the begin- 
ning and directs every step along the way. 

Is the aim the conversion of sinners? That is an 
aim of the church in all its operations, at home and 
abroad ; hence it is no characteristic mark of missions. 

Is the aim the conversion of the world? That is 
far too vague. It says at once too much and too 
little. The mission must not stop with the conver- 
sion of heathen. It must seek their edification and 
sanctification. It must not stop with individuals. It 
must build them up into a Christian society. On the 
other hand, there is no warrant founded on Scripture, 
reason, or experience to suppose that the world is to 
be even converted, far less Christianized, through dis- 
tinctive mission work as contrasted with direct min- 
istrations of the church. 

God's great agent for the spread of his kingdom 
is the church. In every land he operates through the 
church; and missions exist distinctly for the church. 
They have both their source and their aim in that. 
They are the reproductive faculty of the parent church, 
the constituting agency of the infant church. Every 
church should work out into a mission ; every mission 
should work out into a church. The conversion of 
souls is a necessary part of this. The primary aim 
of missions is to preach the gospel in all lands. The 
ultimate aim is to plant the church in all lands. When 
they have done that* their work is accomplished. Then 
the church of each land thus planted must win its 
own people to Christ. The converts must convert. 
The new church must evangelize and Christianize. 
India, China, Japan are each to be turned to Christ, 

30 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

not by missions, but by the Indian, the Chinese, the 
Japanese churches, when these churches shall have 
been securily planted by missions. 

This ultimate aim of missions was recognized in a 
tract published by the American Board in 1856. The 
Rev. Henry Venn, former Secretary of the Church 
Missionary Society, a little later expressed it in a 
classic form. The object of missions, he says, is 
" the development of native churches with a view to 
their ultimate settlement upon a self-supporting, self- 
governing, and self-extending system. When this 
settlement has been effected, the mission will have 
attained its euthanasia, and the missionary and all 
missionary agency can be transferred to ' the regions 
beyond/ " Yet this aim has not been clearly under- 
stood by our churches or our people at large. Very 
many false ideas about the work, entertained at home, 
very many mistakes made on the ground, may be 
directly traced to a misconception of the mission aim. 

Our ideas of the work are apt to be too atomistic. 
We simply keep tally of the number of converts when 
we ought to be planning for the organization of 
young, healthy churches. We judge missions by the 
annual number and average cost of each convert, as 
if, quite apart from the infinite value of every soul, 
the worth of such converts as St. Paul, Clement, Ul- 
filas, and St. Patrick, or as Neesima, Narayan She- 
shadri, Ahok, or K. M. Banerjee, as apostles to their 
own people, could be computed by any mathematical 
process. This atomistic idea is what renders it pos- 
sible for the claims of souls at home to be set up in 
competition with the claims of those abroad. It is 
what gives the monotonous aspect to a work which 
is of more thrilling interest than the winning of 
earthly battles and the founding of earthly empires. 

31 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

It accounts also for much of the unfruitfulness and 
dependence of mission work. 

Another evil resulting from ignorance of the true 
aim is the pessimistic view often held of the under- 
taking. So many missionaries for so many souls ! 
In China and Japan one for so many hundreds of 
thousands. How can they convert the world? df 
missionaries were required to do this, a hundredfold 
the number would not suffice. But the mathematical 
method, though important enough in its way, gives 
no proper test of the character, progress, or promise 
of the work. Missions are but a step, though the 
first, and it may be the longest single step in the 
conversion of the world. The main part of the task 
devolves on the native church in each land. 

Our part is to organize individuals whom we may 
convert into an indigenous, independent, and expan- 
sive church, which shall be the type of a native 
and reproductive Christianity. We are to found this 
church on Christ and the apostles, to train it from 
the start in the principles of self-reliance, self-control, 
and self-propagation. We are to develop its ministry, 
found its institutions, organize its work. From that 
point the attitude of the mission to the church, and 
of the missionary to the native pastor, is to be that 
of John the Baptist to Jesus : " He must increase, 
but I must decrease." The true spirit, therefore, of 
both mission and missionary is that of self-efface- 
ment. They must recognize from the start that their 
own part in the work is as surely transitory as it 
is necessary. They must labor with all zeal to render 
themselves unimportant, and rejoice over nothing so 
much as to find that they are no longer needed and 
can be dispensed with. This temporary or scaffold- 
ing character of mission work forms perhaps its most 

32 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

radical distinction from all work of the pastorate at 
home. 

The science of missions is one of the most fascinat- 
ing and sublime of sciences, demanding the exclusive 
devotion of a lifetime of study and experience; and 
this because the foreign mission work is one of the 
most glorious of enterprises. The aim which inspires 
and sustains it is clarified and illustrated by several 
considerations which deserve notice. It goes hand in 
hand with constraining love of Christ, and a truly 
spiritual conception of the task. 

" Spiritual agents for spiritual work " is the first 
qualification to be laid down by every missionary 
organization. These words of the late Henry Venn 
constitute a fundamental principle in the Church Mis- 
sionary Society : " We take the best men who offer 
themselves to us according to the standard fixed by 
the fathers and founders of the society — a standard 
confirmed by the practical experience of every year 
in the mission field as comprising the only qualifica- 
tions which can win souls for Christ. We seek men 
who have so felt the constraining love of Christ as 
to be weaned by it from the love of the world, and 
to be willing to spend and be spent for him — men 
who know what true conversion of the soul is by per- 
sonal experience, and can testify to others that they 
have found the pearl of great price. It is by no 
formula of doctrine that we judge, but by the spirit 
of the men." 

Everything depends on the willingness, the con- 
secration. The call is for more men. You are one 
of the few to whom it can come. Are you ready 
to go where Christ wants you? When you hear that 
whispered voice saying, " Follow thou me," will you 
not press on, obedient to the vision? Sometimes you 

33 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

must even go in the very teeth of providence. Yet 
this may be only the testing of your purpose. There 
may be at this very time some who are inclined to 
the mission field, yet hold back from the fear that 
they may not be accepted. Do not be deterred by 
this preliminary obstacle. Pray until your inclina- 
tion grows to a purpose and an enthusiasm. Com- 
mune with God until light and strength come, then 
offer yourself to your board. If the door is closed, 
you have done no more than your duty, and the op- 
portunity of quenchless enthusiasm has opened heav- 
ier doors than any closed before you. The true mis- 
sionary spirit, though delayed, will knock again and 
again. If the door remains shut, you may find or 
make other doors through which to pass to your true 
work. 

This spirit of personal consecration to a life work 
can atone for the lack of almost everything else, but 
nothing can atone for the lack of it. He, who, cut 
off from the traditions of the past, from the associa- 
tions of his friends, from the counsel of his brethren 
and fathers, is to become the founder of churches, 
must be sure of one possession. He must know God. 
If he knows him well, with that clearness of vision 
Which comes from the pure heart and that intimacy 
which is the result of self-surrender, he has the key 
to all other knowledge and possessions. Such a con- 
secration will fit him to be a soul-winner, a church- 
father, a kingdom-founder, a true missionary. Now 
let the consecrated man set forth. At the best he 
will never in himself be sufficient for these things. 
But, when in the work, grace may make him meet 
for the Master's service. 

Be sure, however, that he accepts the principles of 
Christianity as taught by Christ and the apostles and 

34 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

summarily expressed in the Apostles' and the Nicene 
Creeds, and as developed in the harmonious and con- 
nected elements of the great Protestant creeds and 
writings. Far more care is needed as to any pecu- 
liarities or tendencies of belief than in the case of a 
pastor at home. With such a pastor any individual 
deficiencies or eccentricities of faith are largely dis- 
counted among those who have so many other sources 
of instruction. Varying peculiarities of different men 
and churches offset one another, often contributing 
to the healthy development of theology. The effect 
of such peculiarities in the belief of the missionary 
might be very unfortunate. If, however, he has 
proved himself sound in faith and in judgment, he 
can be trusted to shape the theological thought of 
the mission church. He must be trusted to do this. 
It would be most harmful to the work for a man 
who has begun an important enterprise to be with- 
drawn from it on doctrinal or any other grounds. 
It should be done only in the case of fundamental 
departure from the faith. Freedom must be the rule 
on the field. Therefore I would be the more con- 
cerned to have him rooted and grounded in the faith 
before he goes forth. Send out only the trustworthy 
— those who, while firm in their own convictions, 
will know how to work with others, recognizing and 
respecting differences of opinion and temperament. 

A general harmony of feeling and a spirit of co- 
operation in work are of the first importance in the 
missionary field. I cannot do better than to quote 
here from the official private instructions of the 
Church Missionary Society, for they embody truths 
which I have seen to be most important : " Learn to 
cherish a wide interest in the mission to which you 
belong; to identify yourself in sympathy and counsel 

35 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

with your brethren, as well as with your own pecu- 
liar department, as not knowing whether the Lord 
may answer your prayers by prospering your brother's 
work rather than your own. This spirit of coopera- 
tion should culminate in the establishment of a native 
church which will be rooted in the spiritual soil, and 
in the end will occupy the field to the exclusion of 
all necessity of cooperation among various foreign 
missions. I count it the richest acquisition of my 
world-round journey to have reached some clearer 
discernment of this mission aim — the vital native 
church. Thus conceived, the cause of foreign mis- 
sions is at once grand enough to arouse all the enthu- 
siasm and employ all the energies and talents of the 
churches of Christendom, yet plain and practicable 
and feasible enough to command the approval both 
of enlightened faith and of prudent business judg- 
ment. 

Such being the aim, what is the scope of missions? 
There need be no difficulty in defining this. It is 
simply as broad as God's redemptive purpose; as 
broad as humanity. The church is to embrace all 
mankind; it must propagate itself among all man- 
kind. None are too near, none too remote, none too 
high, none too low for the gospel. The most savage 
tribes are within the sphere of its influence. Weak, 
decaying races, whose extinction cannot be arrested 
and may even seem hastened by the touch of Chris- 
tianity, are still to be saved, and saved by the church. 
The proudest races and classes of Asia are within the 
gospel scope. There may be expediency in a certain 
order of time, in a certain proportion of labors among 
different races, varying both according to opportunity 
and to the relations of one race with another. But 
all who are not within the sphere of Christian church, 

36 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

all heathen, all Mohammedans, all Jews, come within 
the range of mission effort. 

Does this scope include dead or corrupt nominal 
Christians? If at all, how far are missions to be 
carried on among such people? Some consider this 
no field for the missionary, and would work only 
through the corrupt churches. Others would pros- 
elyte from them and place themselves in direct antag- 
onism to their existing institutions. But, as through- 
out, so here, our clearly discerned aim will settle the 
principle. Christian judgment must decide each par- 
ticular case. If a living church, in living contact 
with Christ and God's word, occupy the ground, mis- 
sions are ruled out, even though the preexisting 
church may have what we consider erroneous views 
and practices. 

But if the church be dead or corrupt, a scandal to 
infidels and pagans; if it withhold the Word of life 
and the ministrations of the gospel from the masses, 
casting a dark shadow over a people instead of shed- 
ding light upon them, then the field is open for mis- 
sions. Whatever its historic connections, it has lost 
its spiritual relation to Christ, and is in some ways 
worse than no church, because it caricatures Chris- 
tianity and makes it offensive to the moral sense of 
men. What relations the missions should assume to 
such putrefying churches will depend mainly on those 
churches themselves. If they will receive the new 
impulse of life that has come throbbing over to them 
from other lands, if they will let themselves be resus- 
citated and restored to living relations with Christ and 
his work, then, by all means, the mission aim should 
be to reestablish the old church. If, in spite of an- 
tagonism, any of those churches can be won into a 
return, through the stimulating and demonstrating 

37 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

power of small Protestant communities drawn out 
from among them and living alongside of them, then 
these new Protestant churches will have served their 
end, and their missionary founders may be satisfied 
with a limited growth, perhaps a temporary existence. 
But the dead church that will not be revived must 
be rooted out and broken up. And it will be rooted 
out, in time, by the expulsive power of the new life 
in the new churches. 

The Roman Church varies greatly in different lands. 
In many it is sadly degenerate. Yet it shows such 
possibilities of life and growth, of piety and power, 
that Protestant missions in Papal lands always seem 
to need some special justification. That justification 
they certainly have in Mexico, Central and South 
America, and in Spain. In Italy our main endeavor 
should be to strengthen the old Waldensian Church 
and the new Free Italian Church, to help them unite 
and equip themselves for the work of simply occupy- 
ing their own land. France is not a proper mission 
field. The Protestant Huguenot Church is already 
living and thriving there, and our endeavor should be 
simply to help that in its growth. The work of Miss 
De Broen and Dr. McAll, so promising and important, 
is in fact simply auxiliary to the French Protestant 
Church, and there seems little question that whatever 
men or funds may be sent from abroad, its operations 
will be more and more merged into the regular activ- 
ities of a vigorous French Church. There are Prot- 
estant churches, however, that seem dead or slumber- 
ing. The church of Bohemia is one of these, and the 
American Board Mission in Prague is seeking, amid 
many difficulties, to bring the gospel to the people. 
I was favorably impressed with what I saw of its 
work. But we must be careful lest our judgment of 

38 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

a church should be mis judgment, springing largely 
from differences of national temperament and from 
ignorance. There are those who think it important 
to have missions among the German churches, while 
to the Roman Church the United States is still dis- 
tinctively mission ground. To me it seems far wiser 
to plant the church in every land where there is none 
at all or only a putrefying church, and to leave it to 
the interaction of the great Christian bodies upon one 
another to bring about that mutual correction and in- 
spiration which shall one day, we hope, make Chris- 
tianity universal and complete at once. At most we 
shall do well in such lands to confine ourselves to 
strictly evangelistic and auxiliary operations. 

What is the mission motive? Let us first exclude 
irrelevant considerations. The aim is again the test. 
No motive can be reckoned as primary which does 
not bear directly on the aim. 

The general improvement and elevation of man- 
kind, their relief from poverty, ignorance,- suffering, 
superstition, and oppression — all this is greatly to 
be desired and invariably proceeds from mission work, 
for Christianity always humanizes, always civilizes. 
Such results are incidental arguments for missions, 
evidences of their efficiency, expressions of their love, 
avenues for their enlargement. But while they re- 
inforce, they do not constitute, the mission motive, 
being of a distinctively philanthropic, not missionary, 
character. All work, medical, educational, literary, 
or whatever else, which falls short of the soul, is not 
properly mission work, for that work begins with the 
soul as it ends in the church. 

There is a growing disposition to praise mission- 
aries for the philanthropic or at least civilizing results 
of their labor. I have conversed with prominent Eu- 

39 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

ropean and American officials in Asia, who have been 
forced by facts to abandon the attitude of opposition 
or contempt taken towards missions a generation ago. 
They value and praise missionaries as the forerunners 
of civilization. Instead of ridiculing, they patronize 
missions. I suppose some do this because it has been 
discovered that the missionary creates a native demand 
for foreign goods. He is regarded as a cheap ad- 
vertising agency by those who wish to introduce rail- 
roads and manufactures into any part of Asia. If 
every missionary in the South Seas creates on an 
average a trade of $50,000 a year, how much will be 
created by a mission in China or Japan? What is the 
value to trade of the whole mission enterprises? But 
the praise and the blame of such fall alike short of 
the mark. Something of the soul, something of the 
church, something of Christ has touched the heart 
of every true missionary, to kindle his sympathies and 
desires to one supreme passion. It is not in the phi- 
lanthropic, but in the theanthropic realm that we must 
search for the great moving principle. 

The mission motive is not to be found in the desire 
for reactionary benefit to the church at home. It is 
pleasant to learn " what we get for what we give," 
and to discover the reflex advantages of generosity. 
It is instructive to see how surely the church that 
would live only for itself dies, and to learn that if it 
would keep its life it must give out its life. But I 
have never known a man to be drawn to the mission 
field by such a motive, or any mission society to be 
founded mainly for the purpose of keeping alive a 
dying church at home. 

My intercourse with missionaries of all kinds in 
all countries has convinced me of the great diversity 
of their motives. They vary according to tempera- 

40 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

ment, training, theology, environment. Christ does 
not banish individuality. He cherishes and empha- 
sizes it. Men's mission experiences differ as much 
as their religious experiences. They come to Christ 
from different motives, they go out on his work with 
different motives. 

An age peculiarly sensitive to the other world and 
its retributions may find its mission spirit first stimu- 
lated by terrible apprehensions for the future of the 
heathen. A humanitarian age, full of sentiment and 
feeling, will be deeply moved to secure their pres- 
ent spiritual welfare. When men come to distrust 
their own reasonings and feelings alike, and every 
argument is a matter of question, a loyal church will 
simply lean back on the command of its Lord. As 
the work proceeds and the church is thrilled with 
the vision of Christ and his spreading kingdom, it 
will more and more do all things for the glory of God. 
In general, when theology emphasizes the sovereignty 
of God, with legal and governmental relations and 
retributive awards, the whole trend of feeling and 
motive must be very different from what we shall 
find when the emphasis is placed on the paternity of 
God, with personal relations, ethical values, and spir- 
itual consequences. 

There are motives that look Godward and motives 
that look manward. Godward motives are gratitude 
for his saving grace, obedience to his command, loy- 
alty to his purpose, love for his person, sympathy with 
his plan, zeal for his glory. Manward motives are 
gratitude for the conversion of our ancestors by mis- 
sions, compassion for the condition of the heathen, 
educational and philanthropic zeal, and brotherly love 
for them as individuals and classes. 

Yet no one of these many motives, efficient as each 
4i 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

may be, is really sufficient for the whole burden of 
the work. They are but varied manifestations of the 
one supreme motive which is the source common to 
them all. That source, the motive of all motives, is 
the great theanthropic impulse that is born of contact 
with Christ. There is an inherent expansiveness in 
the gospel, a latent universality which puts its impul- 
sion upon every faculty of the soul or church that it 
enlivens. It masters and sends them forth, not pri- 
marily by its appeal to reason or sentiment, but by 
the simple communication of its own outflowing vital- 
ity. The main source of missions then is not, strictly 
speaking, in any motive at all, but in a motor, in 
Christ himself as author, operator, and energizer of 
all divine vitalities and activities. Christ is the one 
motive power. He moves within us and moves us. 
He draws us into his life and bears us forth in the 
outflowings of his heart. He is the originator of all 
our regenerate activities, the director of all our opera- 
tions, Author and Finisher of our work as well as of 
our faith. We can simply work out what God works 
into us of himself. " I have but one passion," said 
Count Zinzendorf, the head of the Moravian Church 
— "I have but one passion, and that is He, only He." 
Just as Paul, the Missionary, had said before him, 
" For me to live is Christ." Both passion and action 
are Christ. 

All other motives then are derivative and variable, 
roused to activity only by the Master's touch. It is 
as of old with Elisha and the child. As the prophet 
stretched himself out on the body of the dead boy, 
mouth to mouth, eyes to eyes, hands to hands, so 
Christ lays himself upon the whole being of man and, 
by this vital contact with every part, he kindles life 
and movement in the whole. Nothing less than this 

42 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

impact of Christ upon the entire being with the pres- 
sure of his mission purpose can explain the strangely 
diversified sentiments which actuate mission men and 
societies at different periods and among different 
classes. Not the command of Christ, not the love 
of Christ, not the glory of God, not the peril, or guilt, 
or possibilities of souls, no one of these alone is the 
great constraining force, but Christ himself in the 
fulness of his being. It is the expansive Divine Life 
that moves us in all its rich diversity. 

Trace back the history of any mission epoch to its 
source; you will find that it starts simply in some 
fresh religious experience, the instinctive outcome of 
which, unless hindered by special causes, must always 
be a longing for the expansion of Christ's kingdom. 
In beautiful agreement with these experiences of the 
past is the account given by Principal Moule of Cam- 
bridge, England, of the meetings of Studd, Stanley, 
Smith, and others, just before starting for China with 
the university men. He writes : " A very large part 
of the visit of the young men was spent in addressing 
their fellow-students — not specially on mission work, 
but on devotedness to Christ. In meeting after meet- 
ing we had nothing of missionary appeal before us, 
except the very eloquent appeal of the presence of 
those who were just to go out to the ends of the 
earth for the Lord. The point they pressed on the 
meetings was this : ' Are you really ready to serve 
him anywhere? Have you given heart and soul to 
him? Have you given yourself to him, with all you 
are and all you have, to be his instrument, to be his 
tool, to be what he pleases you to be and to do ? ' 
This resulted first in a meeting where perhaps 200 
university men were present to hear two Church Mis- 
sionary Society secretaries give mission information. 

43 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

The further results are such an increase of men from 
Cambridge, planning to go out as missionaries, as 
was never known before." 

This answer to the question, What is the mission 
motive? brings us naturally to our fourth question, 
and one of great practical importance, viz., What con- 
stitutes the mission calif We have seen how the call 
comes to the church through a renewal of life within 
and an enlargement of opportunity without. I do 
not know that the call to the individual is very dif- 
ferent. There are two parts to it, first the call to 
Christ, then the call to his work. It was in the very 
same day and place that he said : " Ask of me and 
I will give thee living water to drink," and " Lift up 
your eyes and look on the fields that they are white 
already unto harvest." 

There is but one response to be made — Consecra- 
tion. Surrender the will. The rest is only matter of 
judgment, according to providential indications. Men 
have forced their way into the mission field against 
almost every possible obstacle. This was the expe- 
rience of Carey and many other pioneers. Others 
have been led along by providential appointment where 
every step was taken against their own preference, 
until at last they found themselves set down in mission 
work. 

God deals with men as individuals, and most di- 
versely. There are calls and calls — some that are 
special, and some that are general. There are calls 
contained in repulses, and tests contained in invita- 
tions. Sometimes the soul breaks through barriers 
to respond to the inner voice that leads it on. Some- 
times outward providences push on a reluctant or 
doubtful servant. Sometimes the call consists of the 
simple presentation of facts to the mind and con- 

44 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

science, which, when calmly weighed, seem important 
enough to decide the choice of the will and the work 
of the lifetime. The mission field is then entered with 
precisely the same calm business spirit as that with 
which another would enter a mercantile employment, 
only it is done in the service of the King. God calls 
men through the reason as well as through conscience 
and providence and the Holy Spirit. 

It should be borne in mind, however, that the num- 
ber of those to whom the mission call is addressed is 
and must be but a very small part even of those who 
enter the home ministry. Circumstances, duties, and 
disqualifications of one kind and another make it 
plain to far the greater number that they cannot go. 
To those, therefore, who can go, and are in any way 
fit to go, the call for more men must come with ten- 
fold force. 

To the few who are at once able and willing to go 
there may come many a conflict before the matter is 
decided. There is room and demand for a greater vari- 
ety of talent abroad, far greater than in the ministry 
at home. But it is the very best men who are most 
wanted. The call is rather for more man than more 
men, and for the whole man. We want the men who 
can become evangelists of nations, heads of schools, 
fathers and bishops of churches, founders of institu- 
tions, creators of literature, leaders in all things. 
At their touch the kingdom of God is to spring forth. 
Those are precisely the men who are most called for 
at home, though seldom with so great ultimate prom- 
ise as abroad. They will encounter many seeming 
indications of providence bidding them stay. The 
home church is here to speak for itself, and it will 
often speak very loudly. Important positions may be 
offered where much seems to depend on securing a 

45 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

particular man. The demands of home and friends 
will increase. But through all the clamor of these 
nearer claims the one who is called of God may hear 
a still small voice, as from a far distant shore, whis- 
pering, " Follow thou me." 

Sometimes he must even go in the very teeth of 
providence, yet this may be only the testing of his 
purpose. There are just now some men inclined to 
the mission field who hold back because they fear that 
for one reason and another they may not be accepted. 
This, too, is a testing of obedience. I beseech you 
not to be deterred by this preliminary obstacle. 
Will you not pray and pray until the inclination 
grows to a purpose and an enthusiasm? Will you 
not commune with God until light and strength 
come? Then will you not present yourselves to the 
Board ? If the door is closed you have done no more 
than your duty. The importunity of quenchless en- 
thusiasm is what has opened heavier doors than ever 
closed before you. God rules and overrules, and the 
very damming up of the waters may prepare for a 
greater flood at last that shall sweep all obstructions 
away. 

But two further subjects remain to be considered 
by one who may be pondering the mission calls : What 
is fitness for mission work? What the fitting for it? 
The qualifications are spiritual, physical, mental, and 
social. 

In naming consecration first, I mean not simply 
the act of self-devotion to the mission work. It is 
possible that one lofty act of self-consecration might 
bring a very unconsecrated person to the mission field, 
and that, having nobly come, he might yet ignobly 
fall before the temptations that beset him. What I 
mean is the spirit of consecration which pervades the 

46 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

life, and has grown into habit and character. Neces- 
sary as this is in all of Christ's work, it is, if possible, 
even more indispensable in those who are to be, like 
the apostles of old, the primal sources of the spiritual 
life of whole peoples and great churches. Let not 
any one think that the very grandeur of the work will 
exalt and sanctify an unconsecrated person. I have 
seen instances of this, but it left bitter regrets for early 
misspent mission years. And I have seen the reverse, 
where the noble calling had been desecrated by sec- 
ular, selfish minds. " Spiritual agents for spiritual 
work " is the first qualification to be laid down by 
every missionary society. 

The confidential instructions of the China Inland 
Mission have the following words on " Counting the 
Cost " : " Candidates must be prepared to live lives of 
privation, of toil, of loneliness, of danger ; to be looked 
down upon by their own countrymen, and to be de- 
spised by the Chinese ; to live in the interior far from 
the comforts of European society and protection. 
They will need to trust God, as able to meet their 
needs in sickness as well as in health, as it will usually 
be impossible to have recourse to the aid of European 
physicians. But, if faithful servants, they will find in 
Christ and in his Word a fulness, a meetness, a pre- 
ciousness, a joy and strength that will far outweigh 
all they have sacrificed for him." Much that is said 
here applies to only a part of our missions. But the 
principle of counting the cost and of complete conse- 
cration applies everywhere. 

With all these there should be no marked defects of 
character, such as extravagance, or impatience, or 
quarrelsomeness, or wilfulness. Defects which are 
seen to be merely personal here will often be put down 
there to the fault of Christianity. 

47 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

Next comes the physical qualification of health. 
Mission fields vary greatly in their climatic influences, 
some diminishing, others aggravating, bodily ailments 
felt at home, while they often create new difficulties. 
Vitality and powers of endurance are indispensable. 
No candidate should be finally accepted without a cer- 
tificate from a disinterested medical man, not his family 
physician or chosen by him, but appointed by the com- 
mittee, stating that his constitution and state of health 
are suitable to the duties of a missionary in the particu- 
lar field for which he is destined. The same certificate 
should be required for the wife or children. It is the 
picked men who are wanted, as for an Arctic expedition. 
I have known a few sad experiences, where men have 
arrived on the field physically unfit for the work they 
were about to undertake. After one or two or three 
years of unavailing struggles they have been forced 
to return home, time and money wasted, their hearts 
distressed, their places vacant, their work undone, they 
themselves disconnected, cut off from opportunities for 
future usefulness. Some wear themselves out in the 
first few years of getting ready for work. 

Among mental qualifications comes, first, common- 
sense, absolutely demanded both in itself and as the 
parent of so many other qualities. It brings self- 
knowledge and knowledge of others, self-control and 
control of others. It brings the power of adapting 
one's self to new relations and conditions, which is 
required in the missionary as in no other. Piety alone 
may not fit a man to work either with his brethren or 
with the natives; but if common-sense be added he 
will have little trouble. At home so much common- 
sense has been organized into custom that we are all 
largely supported by the general fund, and some men 
get along with a very slender stock of their own. But 

48 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

on the mission field, where Christian custom is yet in 
the making, the drafts on common-sense would soon 
overdraw a small account. 

Linguistic talent is one of the self-evident require- 
ments. I have known missionaries who, after years of 
labor, could hardly construct one correct sentence in 
the vernacular. They were good missionaries, too. 
Yet I think they would have served better at home. 
But important as is facility in acquiring a language, 
it is not so important as tenacity in holding it. To 
be sure and persistent in this case is more essential 
than to be quick. 

A full academic and theologic training is desirable. 
I cannot say that it is indispensable, for there have 
been great missionaries who have had little training 
and have been mostly self-taught. Yet in studying 
the growth of mission societies, especially in Ger- 
many, such as the Berlin, the Gossner, the Basel so- 
cieties, one is struck by the frequency with which such 
societies begin with the principle of sending out un- 
trained men, and the certainty with which, as they 
gain experience, they make increased demands for edu- 
cated candidates, until now the requirements of all 
except the newest enterprises are pretty much the 
same. The opportunities for self-development which 
come to the minister at home are largely wanting to 
the missionary. He must be prepared to cope with 
the keenest intelligence of subtle heathenism ; he must 
gain not only respect but influence among his Euro- 
pean fellow-residents; he must be ready to teach as 
well as preach, and in almost any branch. There are 
few who take this up as a life-work and are other- 
wise qualified, who would not find their usefulness far 
more enhanced by the added training than harmed by 
the delay of a few years in the beginning. And to 

49 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

many a wondrous quickening of talent comes from the 
mission enthusiasm. I have known a marvellous de- 
velopment in the musical ability and in acquiring lan- 
guages as the result of this enthusiasm. 

As the centre of all social requirements we may sim- 
ply name love. Piety and common-sense will enable a 
man to get along with men, but they will not give him 
great power over them. He must love, not as a 
duty, but as an instinct and a passion. It should be 
love to the brethren, love to the natives, love to the 
heathen. No one can know what that means until he 
has been on the field and lived among the natives, 
whether Christian or heathen. That simple, genial, 
outflowing love will be the source of a power greater 
than any he wills or knows. It will be the secret of 
a beautiful character, and will win men to Christ be- 
cause they have seen Christ in his servant. 

I will name one more indispensable qualification. 
It is that the one who goes out as missionary should 
be sound and strong in the faith. By soundness I 
mean something equally removed from doubt and dog- 
matism, something neither defective nor protuberant, 
the clear discernment and ready acceptance of the fun- 
damental, living, working, practical doctrines and 
principles of Christianity as taught by Christ and the 
apostles. A shaky theology, one cut off from the main 
line of doctrinal development, out of tune with one's 
time, representing only individual, accidental, or pro- 
vincial peculiarities, would be a poor tool for the 
founding of Christ's kingdom in Asia — a far greater 
hindrance to usefulness, I am convinced, there than 
in America. Were I in any way to have part in the 
examination of candidates for both missionary and 
pastoral service, acting with my present light, I should 
be far more critical and exacting, far less yielding to 

50 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

eccentricity and immaturity in the case of the mission- 
ary than of the pastor. It has been the study of the 
work on the ground which has brought me to this 
conviction. The pastor at home has but to continue 
a work already begun, administering the legacy of 
the past. He is surrounded, instructed, corrected by 
the pervading sentiments of Christian communities. 
Abroad it is different. The missionary is the founder 
and master-builder of the native church. It takes the 
tone of its Christian life, its interpretation of Scrip- 
ture, the color of its theology from him, and much 
which might be a harmless deviation at home because 
counteracted on every side, and discerned in its true 
nature and results, may prove a germ of mischief and 
dissension abroad. It is the peculiar, original, and 
pivotal position of the missionary that brings his need 
of special soundness in the faith. 

There is yet another reason why I should be more 
exacting in the examination of the missionary than of 
the pastor. The latter is subject not only to the scru- 
tiny and criticism and advice of his brethren, but to 
the withdrawal of their fellowship in his association, 
or at a council upon a change of location. But when 
the missionary is once on the field it is most important 
that he should be left to free, untrammelled develop- 
ment of his faith. If he have proved himself thor- 
oughly rooted and grounded in the gospel, sound in 
faith and in the judgment, he can be trusted to en- 
counter the subtle philosophies of the East, and to 
shape the theological thought of the new church. 

By being strong in the faith I mean more than I 
can begin to say here. The missionary needs to have 
such a firm grip on the central truths of Christianity 
that, even should he experience a change in his views 
on outlying doctrines, he cannot be moved from the 

5i 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

centre, holding that so strongly that no wavering at 
the circumference will shake him. He must be strong, 
not only to defend the faith, but to establish it, impart 
it, and use it; strong enough in it to hold its essence 
under every new form, to keep the same firm grasp 
upon it, though it assume Protean shapes within his 
hands. He needs to be one capable of seeing the 
deep meaning in the remark of Rothe, that there is 
nothing more changeable than Christianity, but that 
in this lies not its weakness but its strength. More 
than other men he needs to distinguish between the 
essential and the incidental, the transient, the histor- 
ical, and the eternal in Christianity; more than others 
he needs to know the true proportion of faith. Pre- 
senting it on the historic basis, and in the historic 
development which belongs to himself as a European, 
an American, a New-Englander, perhaps, he must yet 
present it in such way as not to fetter but to stimulate 
the native mind, so that from the start, being rightly 
founded, it may find its natural Asiatic development, 
according to the traits of the Chinese or Indian mind, 
rather than be forever bound to the one-sided peculiar- 
ities of occidental thinking. 

To sum up : The faith of the missionary should be a 
sound faith, having in itself the promise of life and 
healthy development; a positive faith, not distrusting 
and consuming itself, but aggressive and dominant in 
its hold upon others, persuasive of their minds, and 
constructive of both character and faith for the new 
church. It should be a deep faith, laying hold upon 
God ; a Biblical faith, resting on the foundation of 
Jesus Christ and his apostles ; a broad faith, compre- 
hensive enough to include Asiatic as well as European 
schools of theology ; a simple faith, suited to the intel- 
ligence of a strange people and an infant church; a 

5 2 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

reverent faith, not dogmatizing beyond the limits of 
Revelation; and a well-proportioned faith, placing 
main emphasis upon the central and fundamental fea- 
tures of the gospel, not carried away by any theo- 
logical caprice or phantasy. 

A sound body, a trained mind, linguistic talent, and 
common-sense, a rounded character and a loving heart, 
clear, firm faith, and consecrated piety — these con- 
stitute fitness for the mission work. There are degrees 
in them all, but I am happy to say that I have found 
on the whole a large fulfilment of these demands 
among the missionaries I have met. 

Last of all, how shall one who is in some degree fit 
be specially fitted for the mission work? The Euro- 
pean answer to that is different from the American. 
At Berlin and at Basel, at Islington, London, and at 
Canterbury, as well as in other places, there are large 
missionary colleges where young men are taken even 
in the beginning of their studies and trained for the 
mission work. This practice, however, has sprung, 
not from preference, but from necessity. In Germany 
and England alike the number of university men who 
have entered into the mission work has been extremely 
small. From Cambridge, England, only one mission- 
ary went forth before the year 1836, and that was in 
the year 181 5. The only way to supply missionaries 
at all was to train them in a special institution. This 
has brought the question of missionary instruction to 
the front. But after some personal observation I am led 
to believe that the instruction given at these missionary 
seminaries is essentially the same as that given in our 
seminaries, only not so extended and not so good. If 
men of academic training can be secured, and that is 
happily the case in this country — where from the time 
of Nott and Judson and Mills up to these days of 

S3 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

Forman and Wilder the colleges have been originators 
of mission societies and movements — then there need 
be little difference in the general training of mission- 
aries and pastors. 

Yet the choice of such a vocation early in one's 
course will lead a student to place special emphasis all 
the way through on whatever lies in the lines of his 
work. In his exegesis the mission purpose of the 
Bible will shine out brighter to him than to others. 
In church history he will bestow especial attention 
upon the expansion of the church, its relation to pagan 
systems, its organization in different lands. In apolo- 
getics he will ever be asking himself how to adapt the 
evidences of Christianity to the peculiarities of Bud- 
dhist, Hindu, or Mohammedan minds. The compara- 
tive study of religions in both their history and their 
philosophy will enable him to judge how apologetics 
should be recast for such purposes. 

In the study of dogmatics I think the one who is to 
be a missionary will feel a little more strongly for that 
reason the need of clearness and largeness of view. 
He will distinguish a little more carefully between the 
essential and the accidental in our faith, the local and 
the universal, while he will ask that somewhere and 
somehow the science of missions shall be opened up to 
him and to his coadjutors, on whose home support he 
must count. Geography and travel will become practi- 
cal and sacred studies for his leisure hours, sociology 
will prepare him to understand the structure of the 
strange societies and civilizations which will confront 
him, and mission biographies and reports will mean 
more to him than to any one else. Thus he will have, 
not so much different studies, as different meanings 
in the same studies. If to these he can add a course 
of medical lectures, unless he goes to Japan, and the 

54 



THE PRINCIPLES OF MISSIONS 

study of Sanskrit or Arabic if he is to go to India or 
among Mohammedans, and a fair knowledge of sacred 
music, he will do well. Some experience in teaching 
is well ; also an acquaintance with tools for mechanical 
and industrial employments. Nothing of that sort will 
come amiss. 

It would be extremely valuable to him if he could 
take some time to study the history, organization and 
methods of leading churches and societies in America 
and Europe. He is to be an organizer both of mission 
work and of churches. How full of instruction would 
he find the study on the ground of the organization of 
the Presbyterian churches in Scotland, or the compari- 
son of the methods of the London Missionary Society 
and the Church Missionary Society with one another 
and with those of American societies! Or some ex- 
perience of the great evangelistic work of cities, such 
as New York and London, would show him how hea- 
thenism at home is being dealt with. The bitter cry 
of outcast London, the needs of the submerged tenth, 
would quicken his care for the more bitter needs of 
heathendom, the unemerged whole. 



55 



Ill 

THE DEPARTMENTS OF MISSIONARY WORK 
IN THEIR VARIETY 

The variety of work on the mission field is one of 
the surprises which await the visitor and the beginner. 

First in our expectation, though not always first 
either for the mission or any missionary, is evangeliza- 
tion. The seed must be sown far and wide; next a 
few converts may be hoped for ; then come the congre- 
gation and the church. It is a happy thing for a 
young missionary if, after a year or two of hard study 
of the language, he is permitted, in company with 
some veteran, to enter on that great work. Evangel- 
ization is the proclamation of the gospel. Confucius 
says, " The philosopher need not go about to proclaim 
his doctrines; if he has truth the people will come to 
him." Jesus says, " Go out into all the world and 
preach the gospel." 

Evangelism may be either localized or itinerant. In 
the former case the proclamation is made within easy 
reach of the mission-house, and centres about a church. 
In the latter case it is made while travelling for that 
purpose, whether slowly or rapidly. The important 
features connected with either of these forms are six 
in number: the facilities for travelling; the place for 
preaching; the auxiliaries employed; the persons 
speaking; the classes addressed; the argument and 
persuasion employed. 

I would I could sketch the picture of the evangelists 
56 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

of the gospel as in various lands I have seen them set- 
ting forth upon their tours. There are railroads for 
them in Japan and India, where they, perhaps, ride 
third-class with the natives. The iron horse is push- 
ing along in Turkey, and, like a fabled camel, has his 
nose thrust into the Chinese tent for the space of a 
few hundred miles. All along the Chinese coast and 
1 200 miles up the Yang-tse River steamships are ply- 
ing back and forth in every direction. 

But steam can seldom bring them to their real itin- 
erating country-field, so we see them taking other 
conveyances. In Japan it is the basha or stage, with 
its brutal driver — whose beating-stick one finally 
seizes and flings away — or the light, skimming, com- 
ical jinrikisha, or Pull-man-car, with its one or two 
wiry, tireless little runners, who slip them along thirty, 
forty, or even fifty miles a day, over excellent roads, 
to the place of work. This jinrikisha, the invention 
of a missionary for the comfort of his wife, after hav- 
ing spread all through Japan, is on its victorious way 
around the world. It has swept along the coast of 
China, and intrenched itself at Singapore and Penang. 
I found a jinrikisha company, limited, just under way 
at Colombo, and have heard since of the arrival of this 
oriental bicycle in northern India. Wherever in the 
tropics coolie labor is common and roads are fair, it 
has a sure future. When next I visit Egypt I expect 
to find my comical donkey-boys grasping the shafts 
of the jinrikisha. 

In China men jolt over execrable roads in springless 
mule-carts; they bestride donkeys, ponies, or mules, 
or they are carried in a chair by two, three, or four 
shouting coolies. One interesting figure that rises 
before us is Dr. Nevius, in his far-famed wheelbarrow. 
" It is unique," said the doctor to Secretary Seward, 

57 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

his guest. " Yes, and will remain so, for nobody will 
ever want another," was the reply. But the prophecy 
was false, for there come many requests for duplicates. 
On one side of the great central wheel sits the doctor, 
on the other side his native helper. Before them is a 
good-sized box for their books and traps, and over 
them a large sun-umbrella. A coolie behind and an- 
other in front hold, balance, and direct the barrow, 
while a pony draws it up and down through holes and 
ruts and ditches and river-beds, over stones and logs 
and obstacles of all sorts, far into the interior of Shan- 
tung province. 

But the water-ways are best in China, and on any 
of the great rivers and frequent canals we may see the 
missionaries, often with their families and native serv- 
ants and helpers, fitting up the covered house-boat as 
a home, where for weeks or even months they sleep, 
cook, eat, write, study, and receive calls, their crew 
meanwhile poling, rowing, dragging, or sailing them 
from one village to another, as they sow their seed 
beside all waters. Sometimes they have the luxury of 
a sail-boat, and I have even seen steam-yachts. But of 
these the Chinese Government is suspicious, and they 
may be forbidden. 

Across the hot plains of India we may see slowly 
creeping the missionary bandy, drawn by humped, 
straight-horned, tail-twisted bullocks, a covered two- 
wheeled house-cart, where one may sleep by night on 
mattresses, as well as ride by day and night. Or it is 
the northern ekka or tonga, horse-drawn, something 
like the Irish jaunting-car. In Turkey one is happy 
if he can mount a sure-footed, hardy Syrian horse; 
otherwise — unless, indeed, like Dr. Farnsworth, he 
have a light, strong American wagon brought straight 
from home — he must ride in the Turkish araba or 

58 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

four-wheeler, drawn by horses, perhaps driven by a 
Mohammedan, who during the fast of Ramazan will 
neither eat, drink, nor smoke from day's dawn to sun- 
set, but will spend all the more time by the way in 
feeding his horses. Across the plains of Bulgaria the 
missionary will ride in the paiton, or two-horse phae- 
ton, introduced by the Russians. 

There are charming little inns in Japan, with poor 
food, bad smells, and a graceful hospitality that covers 
all blemishes. There are worse inns and worse smells, 
with better food and colder manners, in China. In 
both countries Buddhist temples are sometimes used, 
as they commonly have guest-apartments connected 
with the temple. English-managed travellers' bunga- 
lows, with European food and Hindu rest-houses, are 
found all over India, while flea-bitten and filthy khans, 
with fairly good food, abound in Turkey. But the 
best thing of all, especially in India, is the large tent, 
which may be pitched in a grove near some central 
village. As the evangelist may be out for months, he 
has his whole family with him, his books, his furni- 
ture, every provision for health and work. " Day by 
day he sallies forth with the message of peace on his 
lips; he takes his station on the steps of some idol 
temple, or, it may be, under some spreading tree; the 
people flock around and listen to the word of life. 
Partly from curiosity, partly from desire of informa- 
tion, numbers of persons visit the missionary in his 
tent, and not infrequently, sitting in the tent door, 
he preaches to a little knot of visitors with more com- 
fort, and, perhaps, more effect, than when he preached 
in their villages. His band of helpers, too, scatters 
itself about in the adjoining villages, and brings to 
him every day the report of their work." 

The variety of platform from which he speaks is as 
59 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

great as the variety of his travel and housing. From 
the fence of the mission-compound in Bombay, sup- 
ported by a schoolboy choir, he may address a motley 
crowd upon the sidewalk, while the passing street-car 
shows faces all agape with curiosity at the sight. In 
the cool of the morning in the same city, without need 
of license from magistrate — for preaching of the gos- 
pel is freer in Bombay than in Boston — he may stand 
in an open square and proclaim the good news to a 
few score of Hindu coolies, with a sprinkling of Mo- 
hammedans, who interrupt from time to time, until he 
stops their mouth with a song. You may see him 
address more docile Moslems in the vestibule of the 
native church, or high-caste Hindus in a little upper 
room of their own dwelling. In Calcutta he has an Eng- 
lish open-air service every Sunday in Beadon Square 
for educated Hindus — a service in which you may join. 
In Madras you stand under a shed just off the street, 
and hear the Moslems addressed again. You go to 
the bazaars or market-places and find, as at Allaha- 
bad, a Presbyterian open chapel, in which and from 
which the thronging masses are daily reached. In 
Peking, Han-kow, and Canton are scores of these 
street chapels, where for four or five hours a day the 
gospel is preached or talked or sung by the missionary 
or his helper. Merchants and laborers drop in for rest 
or from curiosity, hear the news, and go out again to 
their business. At Han-kow, a great trade centre, 
representatives of nine provinces may be seen at such 
audiences. The great Indian melas, or religious festi- 
bals, where thousands and hundreds of thousands are 
often gathered together, give a remarkable opportun- 
ity 7 for preaching. A crowd is drawn to any spot, leaf- 
lets are distributed, songs sung, the difference between 
Christian and Hindu worship explained. In Japan 

60 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

there are great theatre-meetings, or some Buddhist 
temple is opened; or, in Turkey, perhaps some old 
Christian church. The tea-house becomes a chapel 
in Japan ; the rest-house in India, the khan in Turkey. 
Everywhere private rooms of inquiring heathen are 
turned to account, while many audiences are gathered 
in the bustee or mohulla, the common enclosure of a 
group of families. One mission reports twenty-two 
such places in Delhi, India. 

You may imagine your substitute abroad talking 
from his gospel-boat to a group of people on the shore ; 
or marching with his helpers through the main street 
of the village, until, in the public square, he has drawn 
a crowd together, with whom he then begins a conver- 
sation, addressing the head men first, perhaps, with 
questions and answers, until the talk becomes general. 
My friend, who has been but a few months in China, 
lunches with me at an open tea-house, on the way to 
the Great Wall. As we finish our meal he looks 
around for a moment at the group of inquisitive peo- 
ple who have pressed themselves closely but not rudely 
about us. Then he mounts the stone seat, and, secure 
in my ignorance of the language, gives his first gospel 
talk to the Chinese. " You will be near the mark," 
writes one, " if you imagine the gospel-messenger, in 
a straw hat and pea-jacket, sitting on a broken wall 
— there is always a broken wall handy in a village — 
or on a door-step, or on a form at the front of an 
eating-house, conversing freely with a score of China- 
men, all of whom, perhaps, bear some mark of their 
occupation, while a number of boys in very scant cloth- 
ing thrust themselves to the front, and a few women 
linger at a distance, just beyond the range of hearing." 

In fact, there is hardly a place, open or covered, 
where the proclamation is not made. House, tent, 

61 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

shed, shop, theatre, and temple ; train, boat, car, chair, 
and saddle ; tea-house, inn, khan, and bungalow ; street, 
square, field, lane, and grove — all places are made to 
ring with the gospel-call by the helmeted, coated, 
trousered, booted, bearded, white-faced European, 
and American, everywhere the symbol of advancing 
power and life. 

There are various auxiliaries. The Mason & Ham- 
lin organ ; the baby-organ, which can be folded up and 
carried under the arm; the accordion; the violin, or 
native instruments, wind and stringed, and drums. 
The magic-lantern and stereopticon draw a crowd any- 
where. Native bhajans, strange weird lyrics, are 
chanted, whose echoes still linger in my ears. San- 
key's songs are sung and liked all round the world. A 
song tells its story and wins its way in all countries. 
The native evangelists sing their effective kirtans, or 
musical recitation of some Bible story, accompanied 
and interrupted by their own strange instruments, and 
varied by spoken appeals and applications. I have seen 
Hindus sit for hours spellbound by such preaching. 
The head man of a heathen village once complained to 
Narayan Sheshadri about his agent : " If your people 
do not come at the appointed time to sing and preach 
to us, we won't stand it; we'll report them to head- 
quarters." He was a Hindu. In China custom sanc- 
tions pasting tracts on the walls in conspicuous places. 
I do not know whether a suit of Chinese clothes with 
long pigtail could be counted an auxiliary, but many 
missionaries in the interior of China find the costume 
a relief and a help, even the ladies often adopting it. 
It prevents much intrusive curiosity on the part of 
those who have never seen woollen goods or foreign 
patterns, and the missionary is not so apt to be inter- 
rupted in his discourse by a question as to the price of 

62 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

the cloth he wears. Some, however, court this very- 
curiosity excited by foreign apparel. 

The persons speaking may be foreigners or natives. 
The union of the two is best. Mr. Jones, of Madura, 
has a band of trained men who divide the city between 
them. They spend an evening with him in planning 
their work; then they sally forth in separate bands to 
do it. The European has judgment, experience, pres- 
tige, and executive ability; the native has the advan- 
tage of nativity, and is often the more effective 
speaker; but a novice in the work will soon find the 
need of the help of a veteran. 

Great account should be made of the variety of per- 
sons addressed. It is not enough to be prepared, in 
general, to preach the gospel to the heathen. If Paul 
became a Jew to the Jew, a Greek to the Greek, the 
evangelist is to take care lest he be a Jew to the Greek, 
a Greek to the Jew, or a Chinaman to a Hindu. The 
gospel is not the same thing to a Moslem and a Bud- 
dhist ; to a Pariah and a Brahmin ; to the educated citi- 
zen and the villager. Adaptiveness is the great need. 
The very words which will carry conviction to the 
heart of one class will be quite misunderstood by an- 
other. The arguments by which one is met in the 
country are totally different from those expressed in 
the city. In the villages of India the people are mad 
upon their idols, enslaved by caste, worshipping Brah- 
mins as deities. " The missionary is met," says 
Vaughn, " by arguments which astound and sadden 
him. It is admitted that the gods were what we call 
vicious and corrupt, but, being gods, they could do 
what they liked and were accountable to nO one, while 
the very prowess of their lusts made them objects of 
veneration to feebler creatures. The wickedness of 
their worshippers is admitted, but either all is maya 

63 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

(illusion), or, if there be individualities, it is Brahma 
who moves within them, and prompts all they think, 
say, or do. In the city all this is changing. Rational- 
ism is replacing this gross pantheism, and the presen- 
tation of Christianity must vary accordingly." It is 
important, therefore, to have men trained for special 
work with each class — the Buddhists of Japan, Con- 
fucianists of China, and Hindus of the great cities — 
while others should fit themselves for the Mohamme- 
dan controversy. Here and there one may be found 
able to be all things to all men. The Scudders are ex- 
amples of this universal talent. So also was Cyrus 
Hamlin, who wrought such wonders in the introduc- 
tion of new industries among the Armenians. 

What methods of speech, argument, and inducement 
should be used? Knowledge of the people must de- 
cide; of their language, customs, religions, and char- 
acter. It is a common practice to keep what is called 
a bazaar-book, in which new words and phrases, apt 
figures, and telling points are noted down. There is a 
growing agreement to avoid controversy. But the best 
way to avoid it is to be ready for it. " I advise you 
to study the native religions," said a distinguished In- 
dian missionary (Stephen Hislop), "not that you may 
set yourself to the hopeless task of lopping off every 
twig and branch of the upas-tree of error, which sheds 
its baneful influence throughout the length and breadth 
of the land, but that you may clearly distinguish be- 
tween the branches and the stump, and lay the axe at 
the root of the tree." But to all such knowledge of 
the evangelist must be added moral traits — patience, 
good-humor, a love for fair play, above all, a love for 
souls. He will talk with his hearers, plead with them, 
pierce their conscience, melt their hearts, rather than 
merely harangue them and reason with them. 

64 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

One great question in regard to evangelization has 
been, " Shall it be diffused or concentrated, far or 
near, fast or slow, long or short ? " The tendency at 
first has been to " long, rather aimless tours, with 
short stops, into far distant regions. The visit to each 
place was rare, the work not followed up, the fruit 
small. " " The itinerating missionary," said Bishop 
Sargent, " is too often like a comet, and the villagers 
like astronomers watching for it. The comet some- 
times returns once in two and a half years, sometimes 
not at all." We went one day to a village in southern 
India, where the people listened with respectful atten- 
tion. At the close one man came forward who said he 
wanted to know more about Christ, but he should not 
see the missionary again for a year, and could not 
read. How was he to know? It was promised that a 
catechist should speedily revisit the village. 

Missionaries nowadays attempt less. They spend a 
week or two at a place, and return frequently to the 
same spot. The sown seed is watched, the ripening 
harvest garnered. At the same time there are occa- 
sional tentative excursions to explore, diffuse, gather 
in. Most unexpected fruit often appears. 

Mr. Tucker, the leader of the Salvation Army in 
India, recently told Mr. Jones, of Madura, that they 
have practically abandoned the diffusive policy, as it 
brought no lasting effects, and are concentrating their 
labor on a few places, and prolonging their work with 
a view to abiding results. " No mission," adds Mr. 
Jones, " has ever prospered by simple evangelizing. 
It is the earliest work of a missionary, but it is the 
discipling that brings the permanent results, and has 
given to missions their monumental success." 

There is no more important work in the field than 
evangelization. Too often, especially in the large cities, 

65 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

it is put into the background. But the country people 
can be reached only by the evangelist. Neither rural 
nor city work can, as a rule, be left for its initiation 
to the hands of natives. The weak point of the 
Oriental is lack of organizing and executive skill. 
The controlling mind of a European will be needed 
back of all evangelistic work for a long time to come. 
But an experienced missionary will know how to keep 
a large number of native helpers at work. 

Evangelists are often forced to say, " We have seen 
little or no fruit from all our labors." Mr. Ragland, 
who had for four years been conducting special evan- 
gelistic work in North Tinnevelly, with two associates 
and a large corps of native assistants, said at the 
South India Conference, at Ootacamund, in 1858: 
" The apparent fruits of our preaching have as yet 
been very small. We can count up about 500 persons 
who expressed a desire to learn Christianity, but, with 
a very few exceptions, all sooner or later drew back. 
Yet we trust that the day is not far distant when our 
converts will be multiplied manifold." At the South 
India Conference in 1879, twenty-one years later, 
Bishop Sargent was able to say of these same evangel- 
ists, " When they entered this work at first there were 
only 1000 converts; now there are 40,000, and all 
owing to the efforts of these men." 

The department which appears as the rival of evan- 
gelism, the most discussed, critised, abused, yet always 
increasing fastest and claiming most, is that of educa- 
tion. It is certainly the most conspicuous work on 
the field. 

Evangelistic work is intermittent, often impractica- 
ble for half the year; educational work is continuous, 
making its claims every day. The one is desultory; 
the other regular. The one is large in its demands on 

66 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

knowledge and experience ; the other is limited in those 
demands. Evangelism is little sought for and coolly 
received ; education is eagerly sought. The former 
breaks up home life and takes one all abroad ; the latter 
keeps one anchored at home. The results of evangel- 
ism are uncertain and long concealed; the results of 
education, if not always the highest, are sure and con- 
spicuous, while the imposing buildings of the latter 
present a striking contrast to the simple apparatus of 
the evangelist. No wonder that schools rank high in 
the reports of visitors and inspectors, while itinerancy 
makes little show and is often neglected. 

Logically, evangelism always precedes education; 
historically, it must often follow. The first work to 
which our missionaries at Harpoot set themselves was 
to teach the people the alphabet. Then they taught 
them the gospel. It was Christianity based on the 
alphabet. If we cannot begin where we would, we 
must begin w T here we can. The proper starting-point 
is the point of opportunity. It frequently happens that 
the gunboat is the first evangelist, heralding to a ter- 
rified people the advent of a mightier civilization than 
they have known. The response is an eager desire to 
get hold of western science, language, industry, and 
mechanism. The more they long to get rid of the 
hated foreigners, the quicker must they master their 
arts. Then comes the call for schools and foreign 
teachers. No gunboat can beat down the wall of 
religious prejudice, but the school leads into the tem- 
ple, and if Christian teachers are first on the ground, 
long before evangelism is permitted they may reach 
the hearts of the people through their minds and 
bodies. 

This has actually been the course of events in Japan 
and Korea. It has been, and is, the order in many 

67 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

sections of every mission field. We may not say, 
" First civilize, then Christianize," nor may we always 
say the reverse. Our aim is to reach the heart and 
conscience in the quickest, surest way. If the straight 
road is closed we must take any accessible way, though 
longer. When the blizzard piles the drifts and snaps 
the wires between Boston and New York, the Hub 
signals the metropolis through Manchester, Rutland, 
and Albany, or even with a double sub-oceanic pas- 
sage via London. It is then not only the shortest, it 
is the only route. It is the same with the soul. The 
point is to get there by whatever road. My friend Dr. 
Kitchen, of Tokio, spent one year as secular teacher in 
Mr. Fukuzawa's school, asking simply the privilege 
of meeting his students in a voluntary Bible-class out- 
side of school hours. The result was that at the end 
of the year fifty out of 590 had become advocates of 
Christianity, of whom thirty-nine had joined the 
church, twenty in my presence organizing themselves 
into a Young Men's Christian Association. To the 
true missionary the school is always an evangelistic 
field. 

This is the way in which the educational work 
grows. The gospel is light ; light on the Word as well 
as in the life. First of all, the converts must be taught 
to read the Word of God for themselves. Here, at the 
start, the evangelical mission strikes down one of the 
most common and darkening errors of all false relig- 
ions — the doctrine of the inaccessibility and unintelli- 
gibility of the sacred writings. All who hear the gos- 
pel message must be able to read it. Hence at once 
a care for primary education. Whether in the zenana, 
the rest-house, or the mission-compound, there must 
be an elementary school. 

But so much only calls for more. If Christian schol- 
68 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

ars and Bible-readers are to be multiplied, missionaries 
cannot possibly supply the demand. Native Christians 
must be trained to the work who can be put on small 
salaries in every spot where they are needed, follow- 
ing in the track of the evangelist. For such teachers 
there must be training or normal schools. 

But not only teachers are needed; there must be 
male and female Bible-readers who can do evangel- 
istic work; catechists who can care for the first con- 
verts in each community before it has grown into a 
church; evangelists who can more and more assume 
the itinerating work; preachers and pastors who can 
train their own people, organize the work, and thus 
lift the increasing responsibility from the shoulders of 
the missionary, leaving Jiim free to supervise the old 
and push on the new work. In a word, a native min- 
istry of all classes and orders must be trained, some 
requiring a brief and simple education, others one that 
is long and full. Thus there spring up training- 
schools, high-schools, colleges, seminaries, universities. 
Soon appears a second generation of Christians, and 
these children have the same claim on the church for 
a broad education that our children at home have. 
Like the church here, the mission there responds with 
boarding-schools and more colleges for boys and girls, 
quite apart from any special aim they may have 
towards the ministry. Thus the simple training-school 
is differentiated into a complete group of educational 
institutions. 

Yet this is not all. Many homes are quickest en- 
tered through the children. Heathen parents who will 
not heed the gospel will often send their children to 
a mission school. The children are easily won, and 
always take something of Christianity to their homes. 
The school becomes their evangelist and makes them 

69 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

evangelists. This is the reason for so-called heathen 
schools, caste schools, or Hindu schools, as they are 
called in India. 

Now as soon as the desire for education becomes 
general — a desire largely created, always fostered, 
by the mission — other institutions are established out- 
side — governmental, native, priestly, secular, heathen, 
as the case may be. This education tends to rational- 
ism and scepticism, or reactionary heathenism. 
Through rival and patriotic claims and borrowed tools 
it competes with, perhaps outbids, the foreign school. 
This has been the experience, among others, with 
Robert College, at Constantinople, and the Doshisha, 
at Kioto. The only way to meet this opposition is to 
keep the Christian schools ahead of their rivals, the 
teacher always remaining an evangelizer. That was 
the plan of Dr. Duff in India ; it is the plan of many 
to-day in Japan, China, and Turkey. 

Of course there are infant schools, kindergartens, 
orphanages, girls' schools, industrial schools, Sunday- 
schools, each with its own special place and work as a 
part of the great system of Christian education which, 
as I trust this outline has made plain, inevitably 
springs from and directly contributes to the evangel- 
istic work. 

Heathen systems are based upon, or interwoven 
with, conceptions of nature, of history, of mankind, 
as false, for the most part, as their conceptions of God. 
A science, history, philanthropy that are true will as- 
suredly demolish those systems. If wielded by the 
hand of the evangelist, instead of the secularist or 
agnostic, or bigot and pagan, such education will as 
certainly build up the kingdom of God as it will tear 
down the kingdom of lies. 

An enthusiastic educator, like some of the men in 
70 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

Tokio and Kioto, in Madras, Cairo, Beirut, or Con- 
stantinople, will feel that he holds the keys of the 
future in his hand. He is the teacher of teachers; 
the former of the thought, the character, the life, the 
society of those who, in the dissolution of the fabric 
of paganism, are to bind the elements together in a 
new structure, and themselves form the thought, the 
character, the life, and social units of a nation. His 
school may be full of political Jeffersons and Adamses, 
of ecclesiastical Luthers and Calvins. He need not 
tour over the country. Here in this one building is 
his one field for evangelism. The seeds for the inde- 
pendence of Bulgaria were sown in the class-rooms 
of Robert College. 

The third branch of mission work is the literary — 
for the creation of a Christian literature. Think what 
our Christian literature is to us; how many centuries, 
how many lives, how many labors have contributed to 
it ! We shall then begin to realize the work to be done 
for every land. The language itself, or at least the 
written form of it, must often be created. Romanized 
characters are being introduced into Japan and vari- 
ous provinces of China. Great and venerable lan- 
guages, saturated with paganism, materialism, and 
sensuality, but poorly equipped with terms for spirit- 
ual and religious sentiments, must be made receptive 
and expressive of the new Christian content, and so 
pressed into the service of the Lord. The homoousian 
and homoiousian controversies of old times can hardly 
have caused greater dissensions and heartburnings 
among the church fathers than the controversies in 
China as to the proper term for God have caused 
among earnest missionaries. 

The central and most creative work of all is the 
translation of the Bible. Mohammedanism seems 

7i 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

never to have known the Bible. Why was it not in 
Arabic? What a difference to the world it might 
have made ! The Nestorian mission in China, and the 
Roman Catholic mission in Japan could both be swept 
away, because they gave no Bible. The open Bible 
saved Madagascar. That age-long enterprise which 
began, for us, with Wyckliffe and Tyndale, and has 
been brought to its latest stage by the Anglo-American 
Revision, is to be undertaken for every language and 
every principal dialect by the missionaries, foreigners 
though they be. Natives will assist, revise, and finally 
complete; the missionaries must begin and direct the 
work. The translation must be faithful, idiomatic, at- 
tractive, neither so high as to be above the common 
people, nor so low as to lose dignity and the respect 
of scholars. What call, then, for linguistic skill, for 
exegetic tact, for spiritual sympathies! What need 
of trained minds, of studious, persevering, careful 
habits! What musical deed was ever so glorious as 
to seize a language, the great organ of a people, and by 
touching its keys to make it sound forth, in wondrous 
symphony, from all its thousands of pipes, the sublime 
revelation of the God and Father of our Lord Jesus 
Christ! The work of Carey and his coadjutors at 
Serampore, and his successors all through India; of 
Goodell and Riggs and Schauffler and others at Con- 
stantinople; of Vandyke and Eli Smith in Arabic; 
the work of Hepburn and his fellow-laborers in Japan ; 
the union translations in China — such achievements 
as these would of themselves justify the mission en- 
terprise. 

When I was in Tinnevelly, Bishop Sargent told me 
of a rich native who was ready to give money to the 
Hindus for founding a large school if they would have 
the Bible read in it. When the priests consulted to- 

72 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

gether, one of them said : " It is not the mere written 
Word that can advance Christianity. Only when 
translated into act has it power, so we need not fear 
the mere reading of the Bible." But another objected : 
" That is not the case. The mere printed Word of 
the Bible has a power in itself. Who could read the 
third chapter of Daniel, for instance, and not see that 
the Bible treats all worship of images as false ? " So 
the offer was rejected. They were wise. The Bible 
is a living book, and many are the instances where 
the simple reading of the Word has brought convic- 
tion, conversion, and even the forming of a Christian 
community. 

At the same time no vernacular Bible is satisfactory 
or permanent except in the hands of a living church. 
This is clearly shown by the differing fate and fruit 
of Carey's different translations, according as each 
was or was not committed to a church. In China, 
moreover, the great Protestant cry, " The Bible with- 
out note or comment/' has been dropped, and the 
Shanghai Conference voted for an annotated Bible. 

Now on this foundation the whole Christian lit- 
erature of many a people is to be reared. All the ap- 
paratus for studying the languages must be prepared. 
Then come translations, compilations, compositions 
of every kind of book. There must be text-books for 
schools and colleges and theological students; lit- 
erature for homes, churches, Sunday-schools, and the 
natives. There is editorial work to be done in pub- 
lishing papers and other periodicals. Hymn and tune 
books must be prepared. Even the sacred books of 
other religions are largely translated by missionaries. 
I do not mention their contributions to Geography, 
History, and Natural Science. " Other colonizers," 
says Dr. Cust " applying to one country what is true 

73 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

in some degree of all, may have caused cities to spring 
up in what was lately a waste, and turned virgin 
prairies into a garden of cereals, saccharines, and oils ; 
but to the missionaries alone has it been given to go 
among a savage people who had no alphabet and had 
never heard of the ink-bottle and the reed pen, and 
in a few years to lead them across a gulf which other 
nations have only traversed in the slow progress of 
centuries, to fashion for them a literary language out 
of their own vocables, teaching them to read and 
write, to join in prayer and praise and song, to start 
a printing-press in their midst and make use of the 
people themselves to work it, so that the African has 
taken in, adopted, and practised within twenty-five 
years what took the Greek and Latin twenty-five cen- 
turies to accomplish. These are but fragments of the 
great edifice of Christian belief and life, which it is 
the object of missions to erect, and which no other 
conceivable agency could have effected." 

The fourth and youngest of the major departments 
of missions is the medical work. It goes directly back 
to the example of our Lord, " who had compassion 
for the sick and healed them, and gave his disciples 
power to heal all manner of sickness and all manner 
of disease." 

The missionary community itself must have medical 
help. No person skilled to cure can behold the suf- 
fering mass of humanity about him without doing 
something to relieve their distress. The work once 
begun enlarges, presses, brings forth fruit, until special 
physicians must be sent out. Such marvellous skill, 
such unimagined kindness establish a claim on the 
respect and gratitude of the patient, which makes an 
open avenue for the gospel. That is the philosophy 
of medical missions. At the same time their very 

74 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

skill and success excite superstitious awe, as of witch- 
craft, which may become the source of slander and 
riot, as in China. 

Even the ancient civilization of China, with all its 
achievements, has accomplished little for the cure of 
disease. Their superstition forbids to this day the 
dissection of the human body, and I found only models 
of papier-mache in the mission medical schools. Anat- 
omy, physiology, pathology, and materia me die a are 
not only unknown, but replaced by most absurd the- 
ories. Surgery is practised in China in only the 
rudest way. " Before surgeons came from the west," 
says Dr. Kerr, " there was no one in all the empire 
who would venture to puncture an abscess or remove 
the simplest tumor." Diseases are the visitation of 
evil spirits, and are to be driven out by gongs and 
fire-crackers, or by drinking the ashes of hieroglyphic 
charms. Think of the sufferings of mothers and 
children, of the pains of disease, enhanced a hundred 
times by superstitious terrors! There is often a kind 
of intuitive knowledge of the use of native herbs in 
sickness, but beyond that the native medicine-man is 
a quack whose profession in the eyes of his people 
ranks with the mysterious occupations of the priest 
and the soothsayer. 

The medical missionary should be one thoroughly 
trained for his work, especially in surgery. But the 
chief object should always be kept foremost in his 
mind — evangelization. Just as the literary work 
simply gives a basis for the direct aim of the mission, 
so the medical work, which treats man as an embodied 
soul, must keep the soul always in view. " Philip has 
shrunk into an ambassador," wrote Dr. Carey once of 
his son. The missionary should never shrink into a 
mere physician. 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

Next to this danger is that of neglecting the lan- 
guage. More than all other men the missionary is 
pressed into the work from the start. But his use- 
fulness will be permanently injured if he does not 
devote the first year almost exclusively to the study 
of the language. Dr. Lowe, of the Edinburgh Med- 
ical Society, even recommends that he be sent to a 
station distant from his future work, and that his full 
medical and surgical outfit be not supplied until he 
has passed his examinations in the vernacular. 

The divisions of the work are mainly four. He 
may do a localized or an itinerant work. He may 
have a hospital or a dispensary. Probably he will 
combine two or more of them. Besides this, he will 
soon begin to train his assistants, all of whom should 
be Christians, as nurses and physicians. They will 
become medical missionaries to their own people. The 
hospital and dispensary may often be made self-sup- 
porting through their benefits to the local community, 
whether native or European. This is the case with 
the hospitals at Tientsin, Shanghai, and Foochow. In 
India the government gives grants to such medical 
work. 

But the medical missionary must avoid being drawn 
from his evangelistic work into private practice. The 
attractions and emoluments of this are frequently 
great. If he have not taken up the cross for life, if 
he be not fully consecrated, he may yield. 

It is important that the physician should also be a 
preacher. This office he cannot delegate to others. 
If he neglect the gospel, he need not be surprised that 
his assistants and patients do the same. 

As a model of what should be done, let me give a 
sketch of Dr. McKenzie's famous hospital, as I found 
it in Tientsin in 1888. He had then an average of 

76 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

forty-two in-patients daily, the average length of stay 
being twenty-one and one-half days. As a rule, the 
patient paid for his food and provided his bedding. 
The doctor employed two dispensers, three ward at- 
tendants, a cook, a gate-keeper, and a coolie, all but 
the last being active Christians. He began each day 
with a conversational Bible-reading of three-quarters 
of an hour, many of the patients taking part. Medical 
work in the wards is all done before two o'clock. 
After that the ward attendants spend a large portion 
of every day in teaching the catechism to those pa- 
tients who can and will receive instruction. Enthu- 
siasm is aroused, and the more advanced among the 
patients help instruct the others. Tuesday evenings 
a class is held for gathering up the fruit of the week. 
Friday evenings there is a special meeting of the 
helpers and other Christians for prayer and study of 
the Scriptures. I have met few missionaries who 
have so impressed me with the spiritual power of 
their life as did Dr. McKenzie, now gone to his re- 
ward. When I asked him what the viceroy, Li Hung 
Chang, the chief patron of the hospital, thought of 
this so marked religious feature, he replied, " He 
thinks it a harmless eccentricity." But this eccentric- 
ity is so effective that more members are usually re- 
ceived into the London Missionary Society church at 
Tientsin from this hospital than from all other sources. 
There is a great difference in the opportunities pre- 
sented by different countries for medical work. In 
Japan the day for such work is gone by. The native 
physicians are well trained and numerous. They re- 
gard such movements with jealousy. In India the 
government does much itself for the sick, but it also 
welcomes and aids medical missionaries. Female phy- 
sicians are needed who, unlike those serving under 

77 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

the Lady Dufferin fund, and therefore pledged against 
uttering a word about religion, shall be as skilful in 
teaching Christ as in healing sickness. China is the 
great field for medical missionaries ; nothing so much 
breaks down Chinese pride or secures the people's 
gratitude. 

In 1849 there were not more than forty medical 
missionaries in the whole field. The first three to 
China were from the American Board, the leader 
among them being Dr. Peter Parker, who " opened 
China to the gospel at the point of his lancet." 

I have described the four great departments of work 
on the field. But it would be an error to suppose that 
this is all. There are other minor branches. 

Fifth, the musical work. If people are to praise 
God they must have voices, songs, hymns, and instru- 
ments of praise. If we can make the songs of these 
melody-loving peoples, we shall be sure to gain their 
hearts. Next to the Bible comes the hymn and tune 
book. The missionary may find sweet native poets, 
such as are in the Marathi Mission. He may spar- 
ingly introduce the best tunes from his own land, 
much of Sankey's music being very popular. Still 
more should he cull out the best native melodies, trans- 
fer them to our musical scale, and have them set to 
appropriate words. Then he should train his voices. 
Two of our missionaries in Japan have devoted months 
to the preparation of a uniform hymn and tune book, 
now completed. I have seldom heard better congre- 
gational singing than at Ahmadnagar, in India, and 
at Samokov, Bulgaria. How many souls all round 
the world are sung into the kingdom of heaven ! 

Sixth, the mechanical or industrial department. 
Partly to help pupils pay their way through school, 
partly to provide a future means of support for 

78 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

orphans, or any young persons, many schools and 
orphanages have an industrial department connected 
with them, in which young men, perhaps young 
women, are taught various trades. The Roman Cath- 
olics have long made use of the plan with great suc- 
cess, and it is being extensively adopted by Prot- 
estants. I have seen such departments in Bardizag, 
near Nicomedia, and in Samokov; also in other mis- 
sions of other bodies. Girls learn to sew and spin and 
weave. Boys learn the carpenter's, cabinet-maker's, 
tailor's, shoemaker's, and printer's trades. The Basel 
Mission has a most extensive work of this kind in 
India. The American Board has an industrial school 
at Sirur, near Ahmadnagar, over which Mr. Winsor 
is most enthusiastic. Another has been introduced at 
Foochow. Every mechanical gift which a missionary 
possesses will be utilized in this work. 

Seventh, the episcopal or paternal department. This 
is rather a function than a department, because it is 
interwoven with almost everything a missionary does. 
In most countries native Christians, even pastors, long 
remain children, dependent on the missionary for guid- 
ance and aid. Nowhere at home, in non-episcopal 
churches, will a man be so called upon to exercise 
this function of oversight and direction as on the mis- 
sion field. He is the teacher of the teachers, the guide 
of the guides. He is the head of many families, the 
powerful, wise one to whom a large circle of converts 
and helpers look for advice, comfort, and, too often, 
for pay or alms. " You are the father and the mother 
of us all." He is consulted about marriages and fu- 
nerals, and is the general father-confessor. While 
much of this should be avoided, he must long remain 
the practical bishop among the native pastors and 
churches. There is such a demand for organizing, 

79 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

executive, governing talent as, at home, comes to not 
one in a thousand. The missionary should be a states- 
man, a man able to know, select, train, and guide men ; 
he should be a churchman, able to found and develop, 
not one church alone, but whole groups of churches. 
The culmination of missionary life seems to be reached 
in this episcopal function. 

Every one of these seven departments directly con- 
cerns the people to whom the missionary is sent. There 
are others which concern them only indirectly, yet are 
indispensable. They are: 

Eighth, architectural. Everywhere houses must be 
built or adapted for use. Everywhere school-houses, 
chapels, churches are to be put up ; therefore, the mis- 
sionary must be an architect and builder. Yes, he 
must often be the contractor, master-mechanic, and 
master-mason. I have seen the missionary working 
most of the day with brick and mortar. Then he 
changes his clothes and teaches a class of boys, re- 
citing, perhaps, in a shed until the school-building is 
completed. But as a rule, I must confess, I have ad- 
mired the pluck and devotion of these amateur archi- 
tects more than their success. They do not, however, 
make the mistake of a friend of mine, I will not say 
where, who planned a fine two-story building, and only 
realized when it was too late to change that he had 
allowed no room for a stairway, which, therefore, was 
built on from the outside. Far too often in the trop- 
ical climate of India a stiff New England meeting- 
house is erected, with no more comeliness than adapta- 
tion to the climate. In this the Romanists are much 
ahead of us. In all their great centres they employ 
a skilful architect. At every central station there 
should be a layman competent to conduct both this 
department and the following: 

80 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

Ninth, the mercantile department. I quite despair 
of giving an idea of its variety and importance. The 
missionary is an agent for the transaction of all kinds 
of business. He may be a purchaser for his entire 
station. He must ship all goods thus bought or re- 
ceived from home to points hundreds of miles apart. 
Some one must be paymaster to the mission, and 
treasurer for all its receipts and expenditures. Every 
missionary is paymaster to a troop of native agents, 
catechists, school-teachers, Bible-women, etc. He is 
also, by choice of the native Christians, usually their 
treasurer, or at least holds their funds ; for Orientals, 
even Christians, are slow to trust one another in this 
way. If there is a printing-press, the missionary must 
superintend that. Much of all this should be done by 
a business agent. I know of few ways in which a 
good business layman could do more to advance the 
cause of Christ than to take this work from the hands 
of missionaries, not always gifted with practical skill, 
and always weighed down with overwork, and do the 
whole business as it ought to be done, for the glory 
of God. Such men save the mission thousands of 
dollars, besides relieving men for their proper work, 
and achieving a fine business reputation for the mis- 
sion. 

I seem to have reached the end of his labors when 
I speak of the missionary as correspondent. This is 
no light matter. He must correspond not only with 
his home relatives, but also with his mission board, to 
give reports of his work, and with his brethren and 
agents on the field, to keep up with their doings. Then 
he must often write to the churches at home, especially 
if he solicits or receives special funds from such 
sources. Some men depend largely for the develop- 
ment of their work on funds received in small con- 

81 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

tributions from many private quarters. Each of these 
calls for a letter, and the burden becomes very heavy. 

These, then, are the ten departments of missionary 
work, the ten digits whose fingers most heavily press 
down our weary brethren in the field. I know some 
who have been engaged in all of them, but for the 
most part there is a division of labor, where each takes 
the work for which he is best fitted. This marvellous 
diversity in some ways gives a better sense of the 
greatness of the work than anything else. It shows 
how vast is the undertaking, how broad the founda- 
tion, how varied the call. There is not a single talent 
which may not be made serviceable in the field. There 
is such a variety of work to choose from that all may 
be suited. It is the Anglo-Saxon's versatility of char- 
acter that has so well fitted our brethren for this work. 

I do not claim that even this is an exhaustive cat- 
alogue of all branches of a missionary's employment. 
There are two others which are incidental, though im- 
portant. The eleventh department is philanthropic. 
The missionary is called upon to lead great human- 
itarian movements. The prohibition of child-murder 
and widow-burning in India, and many other benev- 
olent deeds everywhere, "are largely due to missiona- 
ries. Robert Hume has travelled all over India, as the 
secretary of the Indian Marriage Reform Association. 

The twelfth and last department is the matrimonial 
or match-making department. I speak with perfect 
seriousness, though I own to much and amused sur- 
prise on learning the facts. The native girls come 
into the charge of the missionaries in orphanages and 
boarding-schools. They are to be provided with hus- 
bands, and Christian husbands. On the other hand, 
the Christian young men — pastors, catechists, and 
others — want educated Christian wives, just such as 

82 



THE DEPARTMENTS IN THEIR VARIETY 

are to be found in these schools. But the parties most 
concerned do not make the matches ; that is usually 
done by the parents. And the mission now stands 
in loco parentis to the girls. Sometimes in China par- 
ents transfer their daughters entirely to the mission, 
the latter agreeing to make the match and furnish the 
dowry. The young man, through his father, applies 
for any one in general, or for a certain one in partic- 
ular. The mission, which usually means the mission- 
ary's wife or the school-teacher, suggests, approves, or 
vetoes a choice, and further arrangements are made 
accordingly. I do not say that this is universal. But 
in China and India it often occurs, and in some schools 
is the rule. It adds a new and peculiar responsibility, 
but, considering oriental customs, it is often a most 
beneficial practice. 

Should confirmation be needed of the variety of 
the work as I have presented it, listen to the words 
of Dr. J. W. Scudder, at Calcutta : " So far as my 
experience goes, the office of the missionary is never 
a sinecure. Anxious to give himself chiefly to the 
spiritual part of his work, he is thwarted at every 
turn. Besides exercising his legitimate functions as 
preacher, pastor, and evangelist, he is coerced by his 
environment to act in rotation as master, manager, in- 
spector, and examiner of schools, superintending and 
travelling catechist; doctor and dispensing druggist; 
accountant and paymaster; architect and master- 
builder ; magistrate, judge, and jury ; secretary, with 
an extensive home correspondence; a member of sev- 
eral committees ; an officer or trustee of various benev- 
olent societies, and sometimes a municipal commis- 
sioner." 

An old Scotchman once claimed to have invented a 
machine for blowing thirteen fires at once. That is 

83 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

the machine for the missionary. Twelve fires I have 
named. But he may be jack-at-all-trades, yet do well 
if he be only master of one. Master of hearts he 
certainly must be. That is the thirteenth fire, which 
must be constantly kept aglow. His own heart first, 
then the hearts of his people. Out of the consecrated 
mission heart come the many issues of mission life. 



84 



IV 

THE HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

There is an element of missionary life which is 
seldom presented, yet most important. It is the mis- 
sion home. At none of the great missionary confer- 
ences have I found a paper devoted to this subject. 
Yet it underlies the whole of the work, and discloses 
the ideal of Protestant missions more clearly than any 
other point. For the sake of the contrast, glance a 
moment at the Roman Catholic missions. 

Two elements are prominent in the Roman Catholic 
work which are absent or inconspicuous in that of the 
Protestants : the celibate and the sacramental features. 
The former of these involves the sending out, for the 
evangelization of the world, orders of men devoted to 
poverty, chastity, and obedience. The missionary, 
even if not an ascetic, is always to be a celibate. He 
seeks to plant the church among the heathen, but it 
is a church which inheres in the priesthood, not in the 
congregation. He seeks the salvation of the heathen, 
but that salvation is communicated through the sacra- 
ments, the reception of baptism, the service of the mass. 
The Roman Catholic missionary evangelizes little, in 
our sense of the word. He does not preach in the 
open air to the natives. He educates little, except to 
train men for the church or to compete with Prot- 
estants. The Order of St. Joseph, which I visited in 
Hongkong, and which is established in various coun- 
tries, including our own, is an exception to this rule, 

85 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

as it has founded many fine institutions devoted to 
higher education. 

But the chief aim of the Roman Catholic mission 
seems to be to attract, hold, and train its people by its 
ritual, by confession, and by catechetical instruction. 
It establishes great institutions for children, especially 
orphans, gives them a small amount of mental and a 
large amount of industrial training, secures the forma- 
tion first of Christian families, then of communities 
composed of these children committed to its hands, 
and from such communities expands by natural gen- 
eration and accretion. It produces a people not very 
intelligent, not very distinct from the heathen — be- 
cause in India it yields to caste, and everywhere com- 
promises with the social customs and approximates 
the worship of paganism — but a people, on the whole, 
loyal to their church, and as faithful to the light they 
have as most communities. Intermarriage, institutional 
training, public processions, and church ritual may be 
called the main pillars of this work. What specially 
concerns us here is the fact that their missionary does 
not make a home, but founds an institution; is not a 
member of a family, but of an order ; does not so much 
propose to transform and elevate the natives by his 
example and personal influence as to save them by the 
ministration of the holy offices of the church. 

There is much that we may learn from these mis- 
sions, but all the more should we understand that the 
ideal of Protestant missions is a different one, in some 
points directly opposed to this — usually higher and 
more difficult, but always different. Much mis judg- 
ment on both sides would be avoided were this radical 
difference in both aim and method admitted from the 
start. 

The influences of the Protestant mission are not 
86 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

priestly, but personal; the unit of the mission is not 
the brotherhood or the institution, but the family. 
The method is not by confession and sacrament, but 
by inspiration and development; and the aim is not 
simply conversion, obedience, and the church, but man- 
hood, Christhood, and the kingdom of God. 

The first thing the Protestant missionary does 
among the heathen is to establish a home. He ap- 
proaches them not as a priest, not simply as a man, 
but as the head of a family, presenting Christianity 
quite as much in its social as in its individual charac- 
teristics. This Christian home is to be the transform- 
ing centre of a new community. Into the midst of 
pagan masses, where society is coagulated rather than 
organized, where homes are degraded by parental 
tyranny, marital multiplicity, and female bondage, he 
brings the leaven of a redeemed family, which is to be 
the nucleus of a redeemed society. The first conse- 
crating touch of the Incarnation rested upon the fam- 
ily. It is still from the family that the influences 
which are to save men in heathenism take their start, 
and it is on the family that they are concentrated. 
All the hallowed relationships of domestic life are to 
be exemplified in the mission home; all the traits of 
noble social character and intercourse there illustrated ; 
all the regenerating influences of family life are to 
flow forth from this spot into the darkened, deformed, 
misconstructed communities about. It is on this mis- 
sion home that everything else is founded — the school, 
the college, the church, the kingdom itself. The labor- 
ers need not be tied to one spot, they may move about 
in tents and boats; but the itinerating missionary is 
never so successful as when his wife and children are 
with him wherever he encamps. While he preaches 
out-doors, the wife goes into the homes, gathers the 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

women about her, brings a ray of light into those 
darkened abodes, and gives them their first glimpse of 
true womanhood. It is sometimes the babe in the 
arms that breaks down barriers that have resisted 
everything else. 

When they are at their homes, this new institution, 
with its monogamy, its equality of man and woman, 
its sympathy between child and parent, its cooperative 
spirit of industry, its intelligence, its recreation, its 
worship, is at once a new revelation and a striking ob- 
ject-lesson of the meaning and possibility of family 
life. Whether they come to his church and school or 
not, the natives seem always ready to visit the mis- 
sionary's home, and to remain there so long, and to 
conduct themselves so familiarly, that it sometimes 
becomes necessary to teach them by object-lesson an- 
other feature of the Christian home — its privacy. 
Nothing more significant occurred at the London Con- 
ference in 1888 than this : When the Earl of Aberdeen 
took the chair to preside at the valedictory meeting, he 
placed at his side Lady Aberdeen, his wife. This was 
accepted, and commented upon as a culminating illus- 
tration of the work and methods of missions. It was 
at the same conference that Mr. R. Wardlaw Thomp- 
son, Secretary of the London Missionary Society, ex- 
pressed himself in this strong way : " I will say, from 
observation in different parts of the world, that one 
Christian missionary home with a Christian wife does 
more to humanize, elevate, and evangelize a race of 
people than twenty celibate men. Christianity has its 
sweetest fruits and its most gracious work in the home ; 
and from the home must radiate its most powerful in- 
fluence if any country is to be lastingly influenced by 
Christianity." 

My own experience confirms this testimony. I have 
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HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

repeatedly found lonely stations occupied by one mis- 
sionary family the solitary beacon of light in the dark- 
ness and shadow of death. The members of the family 
have comforted and sustained one another at home, 
they have cooperated with one another abroad. While 
the husband has travelled and preached and taught, 
the wife has gathered the women together on the ve- 
randa of the bungalow and taught them sewing, lace- 
making, singing, and reading. The daughter has taken 
charge of the girl's school, and in her father's absence 
has even been paymaster for the station. On the other 
hand, when the wife has had no interest in or adapta- 
tion for the work, her husband's usefulness has been 
hopelessly crippled. Such cases are, fortunately, rare. 

If we once heartily accept this distinctive feature of 
Protestant missions, we shall cease to apologize for 
what it involves. It is probable that brotherhoods 
and sisterhoods, or communities of bachelor mission- 
aries, have an important sphere, even in Protestant 
missions. It is certain that celibate life, which was 
once hardly permitted on our mission fields, is com- 
mon now for both sexes. It has its own advantages. 
Zenana workers, school-teachers, and lay evangelists 
may often well be unmarried. The rule and the ideal, 
however, must remain the family. 

If the family, in its very existence, is an important 
mission agent, having a distinct work to do, not only 
for its own members but for the natives, whether 
Christian or heathen, especially serving as an object- 
lesson of all the choicest fruits and privileges of Chris- 
tianity, then there must be a distinct acceptance of 
this office by its members, and it must play its part 
in the outreaching work of the missionary. The na- 
tives must be brought in contact with this domestic 
sphere. The walls of the home should be at least 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

translucent, that its light may continually shine through 
to them; its doors should be often open, its table often 
spread for them; a distinct social as well as Chris- 
tian fellowship should be cultivated. It is a peculiar, 
delicate, and difficult work. Those who succeed in 
other spheres may fail entirely here. The social and 
official relations of the missionaries to one another, 
and their personal and social relations to the natives, 
are really the most embarrassing parts of a mission- 
ary's life. The problem is how to stamp the impress 
of their own Christian domestic life on the homes 
about them in such a way that, while neither loses its 
distinctive national type, the oriental home shall be 
Christianized by the example of the occidental home. 
The results of this work are not seen in the reports 
of the societies. They cannot be tabulated — they are 
seldom known; but very much is accomplished. The 
failure, where there is any, arises not so much from 
lack of disposition as from the lack either of personal 
adaptation to such a work or of an appreciation of 
its importance. The subject deserves a much more 
careful study in all missionary conferences than has 
been yet given to it. 

In the social intercourse between a superior and an 
inferior race facts of difference cannot be ignored. 
How preserve dignity without assumption? How 
avoid familiarity without stiffness and offence? How 
Christianize without Europeanizing the Chinese or 
Indian home? How prevent the outward imitation 
of habits and surroundings injurious to the native 
simplicity and economy of life while persuading to 
the adoption of Christian relations and sentiments, 
and of such habits as will be most conducive to these? 
How, finally, keep an open door for the natives and 
allow them to receive the example and influence of 

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HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

missionary home-life by sharing it, and at the same 
time preserve that sacred seclusion which makes home 
a home, a harbor of refuge for the harassed laborer, 
who seeks within it that quiet, rest, and refreshment 
of which none have sorer need than the foreign mis- 
sionary? It is right here, to my mind, that the most 
searching and delicate test of the true missionary is 
found. The official work, whether teaching, preach- 
ing, healing, or translating, can be done from the 
simple sense of duty. But to overcome the instinctive 
shrinking from people of another race, to welcome 
within the domestic enclosure all sorts of people, to 
render one's self liable to every form of interruption 
and intrusion, and to have one's time frittered away 
by talk with individuals when he would be reaching 
the masses or training the leaders — this personal 
work in the home can be made possible and delight- 
ful only by enthusiasm for Christ's work of saving 
men, joined to a personal attachment for the people 
whose life one has come to share. When, in one or 
two cases, missionaries, otherwise excellent and use- 
ful, have confessed that they could not get rid of an 
aversion to the people for whom they were so con- 
scientiously working, I have been amazed that they 
could accomplish as much as they were doing. Yet 
in India there is so much contempt manifested for 
the natives by English official and mercantile classes 
that one who associates much with them is apt to 
be infected with their spirit, and find himself secretly 
despising the people whom he has come to save. 

The Protestant does not go out, like the Roman 
Catholic, detached from all bonds of country, society, 
and family — a member only of an order, bound by 
no higher, perhaps no other, allegiance than that to 
his church. Though he leaves country, friends, and 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

home, and exiles himself for life, in taking his family 
he takes bonds that bind him to his native land and to 
western civilization. He must not become an Asiatic ; 
he must remain a European, an American. If the 
missionary requires to be orientalized in order to be 
successful, then the Protestant ideal of missions must 
be given up, and the missionary must become a cel- 
ibate. The family cannot be torn from its roots in 
western civilization. The missionary occupation is 
not hereditary. The children belong to the West, and 
should return to the West. They simply cannot be 
brought up on the mission field. The eastern climate 
is, in most cases, against them; there is little oppor- 
tunity for European training; much early intercourse 
with the natives is undesirable; the spiritual atmo- 
sphere of heathenism is malarial. It is even claimed 
that children of missionaries make poor missionaries 
themselves, for the reason that, having been brought 
up with the natives, they have an unfavorable opinion 
of them, and do not treat them with the consideration 
accorded by those who have never been on so familiar 
terms with them. I am not prepared to indorse this 
statement, but simply give it for what it is worth. 
This much is certain: that, so long as they remain 
on the mission field, the children should have all pos- 
sible advantages of an occidental Christian home, that 
they may go to their own land for further education, 
not as aliens left hopelessly in the rear and unfitted 
to return should they ever adopt the mission career; 
for, apart from the possibility already mentioned, they 
should and do have both predilection and preadapta- 
tion for the foreign work. Remaining under parental 
care in the mission home as long as possible, they 
should there find the reproduction of western life, 
there receive western training and follow western cus- 

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HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

toms, until sent to their own land for all that the 
West can give. 

There is another fact which has an important bear- 
ing on the character of this home. The missionary 
stands in the East as the representative of the West; 
of the best of the West — its most progressive life, 
its latest achievements, its freshest developments. In 
all his teaching he communicates western knowledge, 
whether biblical, scientific, or literary. He imparts 
the special results of the development of the western 
churches, and is the transmitter of western institutions 
and philanthropies. He works from the level of a 
highly civilized occidental Christian, who has acquired 
by inheritance and instruction certain gifts, faculties, 
traits, and habits, which make him what he is, in 
which he has his life, through which he does his work. 
Living in the East, he cannot be sundered from the 
West, but is thrust forward as a distant outpost-mem- 
ber, still connected with its life. As one called on 
thus to mediate between East and West, to impart 
western life in all its highest, divinest essence to the 
communities about him, the missionary, for the Asi- 
atic's sake, as well as for his own and his family's 
sake, must keep himself in touch with that throbbing, 
growing life. The communication between East and 
West must be kept open, and the home in the East 
must in all essential respects be maintained as a west- 
ern home. 

Imagine for a moment that some devoted mission- 
ary family believes that duty calls them to cut them- 
selves off from contact with western life, and, forget- 
ting all else, to simply live as the natives do, immersing 
themselves in the eastern life around them. One 
decade passes, and what changes have come to the 
church at home ! The temperance work has advanced ; 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

Sunday-school work has grown; the Young Men's 
Christian Association has expanded marvellously. 
Work for and by women, work for and by the laity, 
work for and by young people — all these things are 
new developments. There are new methods of study- 
ing the Bible, and there is progress in theology and in 
the administration of the churches. There is also ad- 
vance in the methods of mission work, through the 
experiences of other countries, of which one can learn 
only through the West. Of all this the purely oriental- 
ized missionary has no idea. Even those who attempt 
to keep up with the march of God's kingdom find it 
hard enough to do so. A returned missionary feels 
himself at first a stranger among so many changes. 
One of the brightest women on the mission field says 
the greatest change is in regard to the position and 
work of women, and after an absence of a decade or 
more she hardly knows how to adjust herself to the 
new requirements. There are some mission stations, 
composed mainly of older men, whose intercourse with 
the home-land has been less than usual, where I felt 
myself among those who were distinctly working from 
the standpoint of a generation ago. The ideas, the 
text-books, the methods, the church life and forms 
were all back-numbers. Little harm in that, some 
may say, where the whole of the Christian life has to 
be acquired. 

But the mischief is right here. Some time the lead- 
ers of the young church must come in contact with 
modern ideas and movements. Then they will dis- 
cover how different is the life of to-day from that of 
the last generation. And they will cease to regard 
their former instructors as competent leaders, even if 
they do not denounce them for teaching outworn and 
rejected doctrines and practices. To take a single 

94 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

instance: I have received complaints from pastors in 
Asiatic Turkey because the missionaries had not been 
willing to countenance the churches in any observance 
of Christmas and Easter. From the New England 
standpoint of a generation ago, as also from that of 
the idolatrous eastern churches, it is not difficult to 
understand and appreciate this unwillingness. But 
one who knows the present practices of our churches 
in that respect would not doubt that there might be 
found a way of gratifying the natural desire of Chris- 
tians to honor the day of the birth and resurrection 
of their Lord without countenancing idolatry. 

There is yet a deeper consideration involved. It 
should certainly be possible, as it is also most desira- 
ble, for the church of the West to impart to the 
churches of Asia now coming into being the essential 
results of its struggles, battles, and development. Our 
nineteen centuries should give the fruit of the ages 
into their hands at the start. Why should it be neces- 
sary for them to fight over again our battles already 
won, to make all our experiments, fall into our errors, 
and encounter all our hindrances and defeats? Ex- 
periments, battles, divisions, and mistakes enough of 
their own they will make, but surely the weapons we 
have forged, the main results we have reached, are 
gains for the world at large. The new Christianity of 
the East should be able to start from the level of the 
twentieth century. The power of the laity, of women, 
of the young, as agents for the progress of the gospel 
— these are largely discoveries of our time. Such dis- 
coveries, and many others of like importance, should 
be utilized in the East as well as in the West, for the 
laity, the women, the young of the churches of Asia, 
that it may not take them nineteen centuries to learn 
the principles of temperance reform, of philanthropic 

95 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

endeavor, and of the use of the agencies for church 
work that lie close at hand. Wherever theology, too, 
has advanced to any clearer comprehension and utiliza- 
tion of revelation, these gains should be at the service 
of the young church. 

" What has all this to do with the character of the 
missionary home ? " it may be asked. It has very much 
to do, I reply. It affects the whole ideal of mission 
life. It simply emphasizes the necessity and duty of 
the missionary family to remain in close contact with 
the rapid movements of western life. They may not 
become orientalized. They are always to remain occi- 
dentals, strangers among a strange people — not men 
without a country, but foreign merchants continually 
dealing in the wares of their native land, continually 
dependent upon a fresh supply of the latest goods. It 
might be possible for an exceptional single man to be 
orientalized without loss of tone, but to orientalize the 
home means, for a western family, not simply loss of 
power, not simply discomfort or suffering: it means 
degradation. 

What, then, does a western home in the East in- 
volve? It involves not a house like his neighbors, 
very often not a native house at all, but one adapted 
at once to the climate of the country, and to the health 
and peculiar needs of a foreigner in a strange, often 
tropical and sickly climate. The foreign mission- 
house should be larger, roomier, more comfortable, 
more permanent than the home mission-house, which 
is built as a temporary abode for one who resides in a 
familiar and favorable climate among his own people, 
who may soon be able to do better for him, while the 
natives will never be asked to do anything in that way 
for their missionary. The furniture of the West 
should be there. He should not be expected to sit on 

96 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

the floor, sleep on a mat, or eat from a plate of plantain 
leaves, or with chopsticks, or his fingers, though he 
should be able and ready to do all this when there is 
occasion. He should have the books, periodicals, pic- 
tures, and musical instruments of his own country. 
In short, he should have a little bit of America or 
Europe set right down in a heathen land, which is to 
be the centre of this work, the sure retreat for sleep, 
rest, and family worship. 

Do I seem to be tearing the heart from the mission 
work, and intimating that he should not deny himself 
and bear his cross, but live a luxurious life? Where, 
then, is the self-denial of pastors and Christians 
throughout this land of comfortable homes? To put 
one's self under those circumstances which best fit one 
for the performance of his duties surely does not conflict 
with true self-denial any more abroad than at home. The 
points at stake are : greatest health and efficiency of 
body, mind, and soul; highest lift and fullest flow of 
life to impart to others ; rest and refreshment in weari- 
ness ; proper care for the wife, who is a fellow-mission- 
ary; wisest training for the children, who keep their 
birthright in their native land, and are soon to return 
thither ; and intimate connection with the home-church, 
which the missionary may often revisit and help to 
instruct. These are the requirements which call for a 
healthy, comfortable, happy eastern home for the mis- 
sionary family. Anything else is not economy for the 
church at home any more than for the workers. Econ- 
omy demands that our agents abroad be kept in the 
best possible condition for their tremendous work. 
Western farmers lose hundreds of thousands of dol- 
lars every year simply through neglecting to properly 
house their farming implements. Let us not repeat 
their mistake with human tools. 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

That there may be individuals who have a tendency, 
even among Protestants, to celibate, even to ascetic 
life on the mission field, I should not care to deny, but 
it would be exceptional. The Rev. George Bowen was 
one of those exceptions, and I found the influence of 
his self-denying life of faith great among the natives. 
But it was not greater than that of Dr. Duff, the well- 
fed and hearty missionary, or Donald McLeod, the 
civilian, whose picture a sect of Hindus was discov- 
ered honoring with idolatrous worship, and of whom 
a Brahmin said that if all Englishmen were like Don- 
ald McLeod, all Hindus would be Christians. Their 
self-denial took other forms. Nor was the work of 
Mr. Bowen a success. Giving up all salary and all 
comforts, he reduced his expenses so low that his an- 
nual outlay did not probably exceed $150. I found 
him editing a little newspaper, and living in the most 
simple and frugal way possible. But after he had been 
doing this for a dozen or more years he was asked by 
Bishop Thoburn whether the experiment had proved 
successful. He replied, in substance, " I have not been 
wholly disappointed, but I have not been successful 
enough to make me feel like advising any one to fol- 
low my example. I have discovered that the gulf 
which separates the people of this country from us is 
not a social one at all ; it is simply the great impassable 
gulf which separates between the religion of Christ 
and an unbelieving world." 

The Indian Churchman, the High Church organ of 
Calcutta, gives testimony of the same sort, and most 
remarkable when we consider the source from which 
it comes : " Mr. Bowen spent a long life in the native 
quarter of Bombay, adapting himself in almost every 
particular to the habits of the natives; he got ad- 
miration from his countrymen, respect and affection 

98 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

from the heathen — everything but converts. Father 
O'Neill again, in another part of India, submitted him- 
self with the utmost self-denial to hardships which few 
Europeans would be physically able to bear; yet he 
likewise baptized scarcely a single person." 

If to prove our self-denial we must vie with the 
Hindus in asceticism, we might as well give it up. 
We could die, but we could not live, as they can, least 
of all work, in such a life. A young missionary who 
scouted the extravagance of his brethren while tour- 
ing started out once with only his blanket, determined 
to show the natives that a Christian could live as sim- 
ply as their own three millions of devotees. But while 
he lay wrapped in his blanket the first night one of 
those same devotees approached him, and in a tone 
of disgust inquired why he used a blanket, as it was 
quite unnecessary. That was the cause of his throw- 
ing away, not his blanket, but his ascetic theories. 
Writes Monier- Williams : " No Christian man can for 
a moment hope to compete with any religious native 
of India, Hindu or Mohammedan, who may enter on 
a course of fasting, abstinence, and bodily maceration. 
The constant action of a tropical climate, and the pecu- 
liar social habits of the sons of the soil in the eastern 
countries, continued for centuries, have induced a con- 
dition of body that enables them to practise the most 
severe and protracted abstinence with impunity and 
even with benefit, while Europeans, who, with a view 
of increasing their influence, endeavor to set an ex- 
ample of self -mortification, find themselves quite out- 
done and hopelessly left in the rear by a thousand 
devotees in every city of India, who fast, not as a 
penitential exercise, but as a means of accumulating 
religious merit." " By adopting the ascetic life of 
devotees," wrote Dr. Murray Mitchell, " we might 

LofC> 99 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

doubtless make hundreds of converts where we now 
make tens; but that would be to try to make them 
Christians by renouncing Christianity." There is no 
reason, then, for attempting to make heathen live like 
Christians by making Christians live like heathen. 

I have quoted from missionaries and scholars; let 
me also quote from an article in the Contemporary 
Review, by Mr. Meredith Townsend, an Anglo-Indian 
official of high character and ability. He is discussing 
the proposition made by some that the salaries of mis- 
sionaries shall be reduced to about one-third the pres- 
ent amount, and they themselves be required to live 
like the natives. An unmarried missionary, he admits, 
may do this for a time while serving his apprentice- 
ship. But then he will learn that he cannot ask a 
woman to share this life with him. " She would be 
simply a household servant in the tropics, the most 
unendurable of earthly positions, without good air, 
without domestic help, without good medical attend- 
ance, and without the respect of the people among 
whom her husband labors. They understand real as- 
ceticism perfectly well, and reverence it as the subju- 
gation of the flesh ; and if the missionaries carried out 
the ascetic life as Hindus understand it — lived in a 
hut, half or wholly naked, sought no food but what 
was given them, and suffered daily some visible phys- 
ical pain — they might stir up the reverence which the 
Hindu pays to those who are palpably superior to 
human needs. But in their eyes there is no asceticism 
in the life of a mean white, but only the squalor, un- 
becoming a teacher and one who professes, and must 
profess, scholarly cultivation. Even if the cheap mis- 
sionary could induce a fitting wife to share such a lot, 
he will think of the children to come, and perceive 
from examples all around him what, on such an in- 

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HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

come, their fate must be. They will be boys and girls 
with the white energy who have been bred as natives 
— that is, they will, unless exceptional persons, belong 
to the most hopeless class in the world. They cannot 
be sent home or be kept in the hill schools, or in any 
way separated from the perpetual contact with an Asi- 
atic civilization which eats out of white children their 
distinctive morale. But for his highest usefulness he 
must marry. The people do not believe in celibacy, 
except as a matter of religious obligation, and if single 
he is suspected and watched. The opinion of the ex- 
perienced ought to be sufficient, and that opinion is 
utterly fatal to any such scheme. A missionary is not 
made more efficient by being sacrificed every day with 
the squalid troubles of extreme poverty, and the notion 
that his low position will bring him closer to the native 
is the merest delusion. The white missionary is not 
separated from the Indian by his means, but by his 
color, and the differences produced by a thousand 
years of differing civilizations which the word color 
implies. He is a European — those to whom he 
preaches are Asiatics ; in presence of that distinction 
all others are not only trivial but imperceptible. The 
effect of the cheap missionary, then, on the native 
mind will be precisely that of the dear missionary, 
except that, as an unmarried man, he will be regarded 
with infinitely more suspicion and mistrust." 

The whole matter is well summed up in a resolution 
adopted by the London Missionary Society, after it 
had been giving special investigation to this and kin- 
dred topics : " While recognizing the expediency of 
employing in special circumstances and for a limited 
time unmarried men as missionaries, the committee 
emphatically indorse the opinion, expressed to them 
very decidedly by some of our most experienced mis- 

ioj 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

sionaries, that the labor and influence of missionaries' 
wives, and the wholesome and happy example of 
Christian home-life, are among the most important 
means of successful missionary effort." 

Just here, indeed, in the point touched by Mr. Town- 
send, we reach one of the many limitations of the mis- 
sionary work. The European missionary cannot alto- 
gether adapt himself to the Asiatics; he cannot quite 
be an Indian to the Indians, or a Chinaman to the Chi- 
nese. He must always remain a foreigner. But he 
can plant the native church, whose office it is to take 
up the work committed to it by the mission and carry 
it on, as only a native church can do. This limitation 
is a most happy one, both for the foreigner and the 
native. 

There is yet one other reason for giving the mis- 
sionary home all the cheer and comfort it can contain. 
None but those who have experienced it can know 
how subtle, mighty, and pervasive is the demoraliz- 
ing influence of contiguous heathenism. The mis- 
sionary himself, whatever may be done for his chil- 
dren, must come in ceaseless contact and conflict with 
it. It is inevitable that he should suffer from the very 
touch of the unclean thing. A distinguished and cou- 
rageous clergyman of New York has expressed in the 
strongest terms his sense of the personal degradation 
he felt in witnessing the midnight orgies of disorderly 
houses, which, in his capacity as president of the So- 
ciety for the Suppression of Crime, he felt himself 
called upon to visit and expose. But the whole life of 
many a missionary, especially in India, must be spent 
in communities whose very religion and temple-wor- 
ship is suffused with the spirit of animalism and 
sensuality. Daily compelled to witness abominations 
of the vilest sort, not only is his own life drained of 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

sympathy and vitality, but the infection of the thing 
he hates steals upon his soul. He is like a physician 
in the midst of an epidemic. He stands alone. The 
interlacing spiritual bonds of a Christian community, 
which bear us up as in a net of safety, are withdrawn 
from him. The native church itself is dripping with 
the foul waters of heathenism from which it has just 
emerged. The one means of safety for himself and 
his children is the Christian home, where everything 
breathes the simple refinement, the domestic purity, 
the personal culture and elevation of his own land. 
Let this, then, be his earthly haven and heaven, full 
of the flowers and fruits and graces of the Christian 
life, as an antidote against the encroaching heathen- 
ism without. 

The mission-houses in Japan are almost always built 
in foreign style. European furniture and boots spoil 
their delicate woodwork and light mats. In Korea and 
China the more substantial native houses are easily 
adapted to European needs, though it is often more 
economical to build. The mission bungalows in India 
differ from those in any country I have seen. The 
intense heat of eight months of the year, the violence 
of the rainy season, the inroads of the white ants and 
other insects, call for spacious, shady houses, with 
high ceilings, large rooms, and wide verandas, capa- 
ble of being shut in from the light and heat of the day. 
Punkahs, or broad swinging fans, must be suspended 
from the ceiling. Sometimes during the hot season 
these are kept moving all night as well as all day. The 
life of children may depend on this constant use of 
the punkah. There must be many servants, for caste 
and custom have taught each to do but a certain part 
of the work; and if the missionary's wife is to help 
him in his mission labors, she must not spend her 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

strength in that which four or five servants can do for 
her. Family worship becomes a special feature and of 
missionary importance. It is attended by all the serv- 
ants, who participate in reading, singing, and prayer 
in the vernacular. Many of these servants are thus 
converted. It is one of the first fields of missionary 
labor, and often the first church is the church in the 
house. 

But enrich and sweeten the missionary home as 
much as we may, something more is needed. It is 
often the thronged centre of church helpers, native 
Christians, and heathen inquirers, besides the many 
visitors who flock there from simple curiosity, or for 
the purpose of seeking material help. It is filled with 
the labors of school and work of all the dozen differ- 
ent departments in a missionary's life. It is down on 
the hot, steaming, malarial plains, or in the noisy, 
filthy city, which at certain portions of the year be- 
comes pestilential. If the missionary is to live and 
continue his labors he must get away from his work 
and its associations, from all the burden of the mis- 
sion, and from contact with the native life. A great 
number of missions have, therefore, secured sanitaria 
in some favored accessible spot. 

In India the whole government moves bodily, bag 
and baggage, from Calcutta to Simla, a thousand miles 
away and 7000 feet above the sea, in the Himalayas. 
Every year the transfer forth and back is made. Five 
months are spent in Calcutta, seven months in Simla. 
Most of this time, while English officials are doing 
their work in the cool mountain air, their kinsmen, 
the missionaries, are trying to work and live in the 
terrible heats below, with their swinging punkahs, 
dripping water, darkened rooms, and every other de- 
vice to make life possible and tolerable. If the few 

104 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

worst weeks of the year can be spent at a mountain 
sanitarium, who will not think it a wise economy of 
time and money and men? That there are now so 
many such sanitaria to offer refuge to our brethren 
is one more proof that missionary management has 
become a science, missionary life a profession. 

But with all the help of their homes and their sani- 
taria, there comes to most, sooner or later, if they 
remain at their post, a breakdown — a time when only 
one thing will enable a man longer to carry on the 
work or save himself from collapse. That one thing 
is a visit to his native land. It is far better, far 
cheaper, if you choose to look at it in that way, if this 
furlough can anticipate the collapse. The children, 
too, must be taken home for education and intercourse 
with other children. The wife and mother requires 
rest. She longs for the sight of her friends. All need 
to be delivered for a time from the atmosphere of hea- 
thenism rushing in at every pore, and to be strength- 
ened and quickened by contact with the great throb- 
bing heart of Christendom. The church at home has 
progressed. In order truly to represent it the mis- 
sionary must keep touch and pace with it. Often he 
has some important enterprise which he is to push 
through in his own country, or he is to represent the 
claims of the entire mission on the home board and 
the church. More laborers are wanted, and he can 
best hunt them up. 

The church at home, too, needs to see and hear its 
laborers on the fields of Asia and Africa and the 
islands. Nothing gives such reality and interest to 
missions as to meet a live missionary who knows how 
to give a living picture of his work. It is true indeed 
that not every missionary is able to do this. It is not 
always the best speakers who are the best workers, not 

105 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

the best workers who are the best speakers. A mis- 
sionary must often pay the penalty of his devotion to 
his own particular work by becoming narrow and ec- 
centric, or ill-adapted to speak to the church at home. 
His mind moves in realms unfamiliar to us, while 
from our interests he is disconnected. He does not 
feel himself en rapport with his audience. Most men, 
too, in all professions are private soldiers, doing well 
their own part, but knowing little how the battle goes 
which they are helping to decide. A few men are gen- 
erals, who can at once direct the battle and report on 
its progress. 

Right here, however, is a point where the interest 
of home pastors and of all who help shape the senti- 
ment and the management of missions should be en- 
listed. The need of these home furloughs is perfectly 
obvious. The statistics of the different fields show 
just how long the average missionary can work before 
the first breakdown comes. For China it is a trifle 
over, for Japan a trifle under, seven years, with a 
shorter time in each case for women. For India the 
time is somewhat longer. For Turkey I have no sta- 
tistics. For Africa it is, of course, still shorter. Physi- 
cians in China and Japan recommend seven years as 
the longest period for the first term, eight to ten for 
the second. But the boards which have the manage- 
ment of the matter look at it from a different point 
of view. The expense of bringing a missionary home 
is great, the loss to the field is far greater, and what, 
perhaps, counts still more, the church at home does 
not understand why so many missionaries keep com- 
ing and going. Accordingly, where there are any 
rules at all, the first period is usually made ten years, 
with a furlough then of a year and a half, with ensu- 
ing terms of seven years. The American Board, how- 

106 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

ever, declined to adopt any rules whatever. There is, 
I believe, a tacit understanding that a man may come 
home at the end of ten years. This is not a matter 
about which missionaries say much. It is not easy for 
them to plead their own cause. I find the matter 
fairly taken up in but one conference, that at Osaka, 
in 1883, where Dr. Berry and Dr. Taylor gave papers 
which should be read by all. Just because they can- 
not easily speak for themselves, there is the more rea- 
son for home pastors, who enjoy from one to three 
months' vacation every year, to protect the interests of 
their brethren in the field. A careful study of the 
matter on the ground, in conference with the brethren 
there, has brought certain suggestions to mind which 
I submit with due respect. We might adopt a rule 
permitting missionaries in Asia to come home at the 
end of seven, and requiring a return at the end of ten 
years the first time, allowing from ten to twelve years 
for the second term, with a furlough of eighteen 
months each time. About the same salary as on the 
field could be continued while at home, and expenses 
of the trip be paid both ways. From one-third to one- 
half of the time might be at the disposal of the society 
for assistance in the rooms, or for deputation work 
among the churches. The society should stand in such 
relation to the churches that it can send men whom it 
chooses from time to time into the different pulpits, 
giving the fullest and best presentation of the cause, 
and saving some expense of field and district secre- 
taries. If this were the rule of the different boards, 
and so understood by the churches, it would do away 
with some of the wonder expressed at seeing so many 
missionaries at home. The expense of such a system 
would in the end be less than now. Wallace Taylor, 
M.D., said at Osaka, " The present haphazard, unsys- 

107 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

tematic methods of most missions and boards are at- 
tended with the greatest expense and the poorest 
returns. Some men break down partially after four 
or five years in Japan, but go on two or three years 
longer, doing half-work rather than ask to come home. 
Then when men do come home they are often so much 
broken down that they are for a long time unfitted 
to do anything but rest. Without some rule, other 
men work on indefinitely till an utter collapse comes, 
from which perhaps they do not recover for years." 

There is still one other matter in connection with 
the home and rest of the missionary about which I 
wish to speak. The theory of a missionary's pay is 
that it should be simply a living salary, affording just 
enough for an economical, comfortable subsistence 
from year to year. Various allowances are made for 
children, teacher, house rent, travelling expenses, 
health fund, etc. All this seems to be wise. Little 
inquiry is made about such matters by missionaries 
when they go out, and I do not remember hearing one 
word of complaint from any missionary because of the 
smallness of his allowance. 

There is just one weak point, which often becomes 
a very sore point. Receiving in this way a barely liv- 
ing salary, none of them can be expected with it to 
make any provision for the future. Yet there are few 
classes of men who have greater need of such provi- 
sion. They have withdrawn from the home field, with 
its promotions and distinctions and friendly support. 
They have put themselves on a dead level of uniform 
salary, the veteran receiving no more than the novice ; 
they have more or less unfitted themselves to engage 
in work at home, and have counted it a privilege to 
pour out the treasures of their life on heathen soil. 
At last, however, their work is done. They have ex- 

108 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

hausted their strength in a foreign land ; they will not 
go on drawing salary for work they cannot do, taking 
the place of a more efficient man. The worn-out mis- 
sionary family comes home. Their salary ceases ; they 
have laid up nothing; what are they to do? If they 
have ever hinted at this contingency, they have been 
told to leave the future with God. That has seemed 
to say, " The society will provide for the bare present. 
Then God must take care of you." Still they know 
that is not so meant. The society will make grants to 
them according to their need. With how little can 
they get along? The thought of their relatives comes 
to them, perhaps of their children. If any of those 
relatives are wealthy, the missionaries may say, " We 
would rather depend on them, if possible, than take 
money which would otherwise go out to the field." 
If not, they name the least sum they can get along 
with. Perhaps they live on here for years without 
quite starving. They feel themselves a burden to the 
board ; their self-respect is wounded ; their hearts are 
heavy. And these are the people who have been doing 
our work in planting the church round the world. 
Perhaps the missionary has died, and the widow and 
children are to be cared for. This condition of things 
is not the fault of the secretaries. Few know and 
honor the missionaries as they do. It is the fault of 
the system. But since the society requires, justly, that 
men give themselves to the work for life; since it, 
justly, too, pays them only a living salary, then ought 
not the society to do God's work in making provision 
for the future of every one who gives it faithful life 
service ? I have talked much about this matter with mis- 
sionaries and secretaries, and there is but one arrange- 
ment which seems to promise proper justice: that is, 
to secure a good life insurance on its missionaries on 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

such terms that each one of them, or his widow, or 
their children, should have the benefit of it in case of 
need, or after a certain term of service. That would 
be much better than a missionary, or widows' or or- 
phans' relief fund. If an insurance fund should be 
raised, it would leave the other funds of the board 
untouched. I speak of this because it is just the thing 
of which the missionaries can least speak, and because 
the claims of justice seem pressing. If the pastors at 
home will take the matter into their hands, something 
may be done. A move is being made in England and 
Europe to have the state pension aged poverty. How 
much greater reason for the church to pension its 
faithful aged servants in the missionary cause ! 

This whole matter of vacations, furloughs, and re- 
tirement demands more careful and systematic treat- 
ment than it has hitherto received. We are passing 
out of the experimental and entering on the profes- 
sional stage. The accumulated experience of these 
many years should furnish us the proper principles of 
action. We dwell constantly on the work of mission- 
aries. We are eager enough to enlist them for the 
service, provided they meet our conditions. Hitherto 
we have given little thought for their provisions when 
they have retired. Let us remember that they are men 
and women, husbands and wives, fathers and mothers 
and children, as well as missionaries, and let us have 
a care for their home, first when they are on the field, 
then when they come back here to rest, or to die. 

We have penetrated into the home of the missionary. 
May we not venture to go one step further and look 
into his heart and inner life? I hesitate here more 
than at any point. If the home is the sanctum, the 
heart is the sanctum sanctorum. Yet into these hearts 
and lives I have been permitted to look, and I may so 

no 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

far share my experience with my readers as to say a 
few words about the trials, perils, and temptations, as 
well as the supports, the satisfactions, and the crown 
of missionary life. 

Among trials I do not mention those most com- 
monly included, springing from climate, exposure, dis- 
comfort, disease, etc. There is both more and less of 
this than we can know. But the missionary does not 
pose as claiming special sympathy or interest in his 
work on this account. Very many of the heaviest bur- 
dens, however, are summed up in the one word whose 
height and breadth and length and depth none knows 
so well as he — that word, exile. It is not merely a 
physical exile from home and country and all their 
interests; it is not only an intellectual exile from all 
that would feed and stimulate the mind ; it is yet more 
— a spiritual exile from the guidance, the instruction, 
the correction; from the support, the fellowship, the 
communion of the saints and the church at home. It 
is an exile, as when a man is lowered with a candle 
into foul places, where the noxious gases threaten to 
put out his light, yet he must explore it all and find 
some way to drain off the refuse and let in the sweet 
air and sun to do their own cleansing work. The 
young men and women who go to live in university 
settlements in the lower part of our cities have a trying 
task, yet they are close to St. Paul's and Westminster 
Abbey, to Trinity Church, the Boston and the Astor 
Library, and all the cultivated and spiritual life of our 
time. The missionary is not only torn away from 
those social bonds that sustain, or even almost com- 
pose, our mental, moral, and spiritual life, but he is 
forced into closest relations with heathenism, whose 
evils he abhors, whose power and fascinations, too, he 
dreads. And when at last he can save his own chil- 

iii 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

dren only by being bereft of them, he feels himself 
an exile indeed. Added to this is the daily bur- 
den which pressed on Paul — " anxiety for all the 
churches." He sees the struggle in the church itself, 
and in its members, even in its pastors, between the 
new life and the old heathenism, and the burden would 
grow too heavy did he not learn to cast it on the Lord. 

There are perils and temptations, too, which are to 
be specially guarded against. Danger of growing 
wonted and indifferent to the evils of heathenism, even 
demoralized by them; danger of eccentricity and nar- 
rowness and morbidness from isolation ; danger of 
falling out with the brethren, or with the committee 
at home ; danger of lording it over the natives, or of 
being deceived and misled by them. There are tempta- 
tions to despondency in the gigantic task, or to com- 
promise for the sake of conquest. There are tempta- 
tions to a secular life and spirit, or to some diver- 
sion from the real aim of missions : temptations to 
shrink into an ambassador, or doctor, or teacher, or 
writer, or scientist, or builder, instead of being in all 
things the missionary. There are temptations akin to 
what we know at home, but they come with strange 
form and force to our brethren abroad. 

There is yet one other temptation, of which I prefer 
to speak in the wise and tender words of the instruc- 
tions of the Church Missionary Society : " The com- 
mittee are convinced that, on the whole, the greatest 
danger to which a missionary is exposed, especially, 
perhaps, during the first few years of his course, is 
the danger of missionary ardor abating, of some subtle 
form of self-indulgence or worldliness, and of a low- 
ering of that constraining love which gives to self- 
denial its true character, making it not a painful self- 
torture, but a joyous self-forgetfulness." In reference 

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HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

to all these perils the prayer must ever be, " Lead us 
not into temptation, but deliver us from evil." 

If it has been a duty to speak of these things, it is a 
pleasure to speak of the joys, the consolations, the sat- 
isfactions, the triumphs, and the hopes of the mission- 
ary life. 

First of all must come the special ministrations of 
Christ to the soul. The more one is shut off from his 
brethren and down into heathenism, the nearer does 
his Lord come to him in communion, the more does 
the still small voice penetrate his soul. That is the 
reason why the biographies of our missionaries form 
one of the best portions of the devotional reading of 
Christendom. Then there is the joy of the first con- 
vert from heathenism, the satisfaction of the spreading 
light, of the rising structure where the humble apostle 
has built on foundations not laid by any other man. 
There is the happiness of the first church, of the grow- 
ing Christians, and the new body of Christian min- 
isters. Despite many hopes baffled by relapse, and 
expectations greatly moderated, there is delight in the 
ripening Christian character of those about him, and 
in a new communion and brotherhood with the native 
Christians. I have myself tasted something of the 
sweetness of this fellowship with men of strange look 
and tongue and garb, joining in work and worship, 
and partaking of the sacrament with these new-found 
brethren. Christians at home are as the elder brother, 
to whom the Father says, " All that I have is thine. 
But this thy brother was dead and is alive again, was 
lost and is found. It is meet to make merry and be 
glad." If the missionary must often walk with the 
Master in the Garden of Gethsemane, sharing his bur- 
den and agony for the souls of men, he often too shares 
with his risen Lord in all the triumph of his victory. 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

The time of deifying missionaries has passed; the 
time of abusing them, also, let us trust. It is not 
always possible for us to judge a missionary justly, 
who, after an absence of ten or more years, returns to 
his native land. Fresh from leadership, he finds it 
hard to be without definite vocation. Fresh from a 
nascent Christianity, he is ill at ease in one that is 
triumphant and often seems corrupt. A long-time 
exile, the dialect of a new generation is not on his lips. 
And we are poorly prepared to enter into hearty sym- 
pathy with his trials, his hopes, and his joys. But 
God has been shaping him into his own likeness, and 
when we read the life of a Hannington, a Goodell, or 
a Paton we recognize that moulding hand, and learn 
to love our missionary brethren with fresh understand- 
ing and gratitude. 

It is with peculiar satisfaction that I recall an hour 
spent with Phillips Brooks shortly after my return 
from India, when I was expressing to him my thanks 
for valuable letters of introduction to his personal 
friends. Desirous of having my own judgment as to 
the comparative standing of our brethren at home and 
abroad confirmed, I asked him his opinion, derived 
from his experiences on the field abroad. " As a 
body/' was his reply, " the missionaries, both for abil- 
ity and piety, stand at a high average." More than 
that certainly could not be expected, while many of 
the most conspicuous heroes are to be found among 
those whose lives have been shaped and whose char- 
acters moulded by their work on the mission field. 

There are many incidental satisfactions on which I 
have no time to dwell. To participate in the great 
work of lifting up degraded humanity is itself an in- 
spiration. But when the faithful worker sees the 
kingdom of God spreading through a great people, 

114 



HOME AND REST OF THE MISSIONARY 

the native church established and propagating itself, 
Providence bringing light out of darkness, and hope 
out of despair; when after long delay all Christian 
agencies seem at last to enter on a triumphal course, 
developing graces peculiar to the very land one occu- 
pies, or in a degree not often found at home; when 
native pastors, the fruit of one's own ministry, begin 
to preach with such depth and richness of spirit that 
the soul of the missionary is fed more than by any dis- 
courses he hears from his home brethren, and new 
gleams of light and new meaning for old texts flash 
forth for him through the experience and interpreta- 
tion of his own converts ; when sects founded by mis- 
sions at the start melt together into a larger native 
church, an example to all the sects at home — oh, what 
a crown is this to the exile's life ! Has home a joy to 
compare with it? And when in land after land the 
native church shall one day eclipse the mission, will 
not the missionaries say, with the soul-filled joy of old 
Simeon, " Now lettest thou thy servant depart in 
peace, for mine eyes have seen thy salvation " ? To- 
day, looking across the waters, the same vision rises 
before me. I know it to be true, because God is true. 
And I know, too, that if we are faithful, if Christen- 
dom is faithful, its accomplishment is not far hence. 



115 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

Into whichever of the great departments of work 
the newcomer on the mission field may enter, he can- 
not proceed very far without encountering problems 
of the most serious nature, which tax and often baffle 
his best judgment — problems which may to a great 
extent be ignored in our home reports, but which loom 
up large on the field itself. He discovers, too, that 
these same questions have tried and sometimes divided 
almost every mission. It is therefore most important 
fairly to present many of these problems to the church 
at home, not only in order to prepare men who are 
going out for this feature of their work, but also to 
enable pastors and churches at home to sympathize 
and, so far as possible, cooperate with pastors and 
churches abroad. 

One of the problems nearest to our thought is that 
of cooperation in missions. There is, thank God, much 
cooperation already. Christians and churches are 
joined in support of their respective denominational 
societies. A few union societies, such as the Bible and 
Tract Societies, the Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tion, the Christian Endeavor Society, and the China 
Inland Mission, show the cooperation of denomina- 
tions. At Madras, Calcutta, and Shanghai I found 
what, doubtless, exist elsewhere — monthly confer- 

116 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

ences of missionaries of all churches. In London there 
has long been held a monthly conference of mission 
secretaries of various societies. There are union pe- 
riodicals, such as the Chinese Recorder and the Indian 
Evangelical Review. The Christian college at Madras 
is supported by several different churches. Local con- 
ferences, such as those held at Shanghai, and general 
conferences like that of London in 1888, both express 
and beget cooperation. The union of Presbyterian 
churches at Amoy and Swatow and throughout Japan 
is noble evidence of the power of the Holy Spirit. To 
the Presbyterian union in China, however, the Dutch 
Reformed Church made vigorous opposition until over- 
come by the firmness of their own missionaries. More 
successful, unfortunately, was the opposition of a num- 
ber of Congregationalists to the grandest union move- 
ment started yet — that of the two leading Christian 
bodies in Japan, the Presbyterians and Congregation- 
alists. 

Besides all this, I can testify to the general impres- 
sion of brotherhood and cooperation received in visit- 
ing some 500 misionaries of many churches in many 
lands. I have been entertained by independent faith 
missionaries, ritualists of the Church of England, and 
by Roman Catholics; by English Baptists, German 
Lutherans, American United Presbyterians, and by 
men of almost every leading denomination. The gen- 
eral spirit was fraternal. 

But the desirableness, and, at the same time, the 
difficulties of closer union or cooperation are very 
great. The heathen world needs the evidencing power 
of a Christendom that is united in its mission labors. 
The vast work of evangelizing the world also demands 
the most careful distribution of territory, division of 
labor, and economy of expenditure and effort. 

117 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

Especially in the great cities of the world is coopera- 
tion important. Nowhere was I so disheartened at 
the prospects of Christianity among the heathen as in 
these cities. Each society has a certain need to be 
represented at the main strategic centres, such as 
Tokio, Shanghai, Madras, Calcutta, Bombay. True 
mission comity would prevent their treading on one 
another's heels. But I have seen the spectacle of rival 
societies bidding against one another for both scholars 
and agents; planting weak churches side by side, 
while large country districts are neglected, and dis- 
tracting the minds of native Christians by the en- 
forcement of distinctions alien both to their thought 
and their history. Even in towns and villages the 
same thing is seen. 

Even when the territory is partitioned out, and so- 
cieties occupy adjoining districts, it not infrequently 
happens that they make havoc among one another's 
converts and patronize one another's outcasts. The 
problem is, how to bring about a practical union of 
missionaries and native Christians while the home 
boards remain distinct. 

The following are some of the practical difficulties 
in the way of union: 

1. The distance in space and difference in tongue 
which separate different missions, or parts of the same 
mission. 

2. The absorption of each mission in its own enter- 
prise, and consequent ignorance of others. 

3. Ambitious desire for the extension of one's own 
work and church even at the cost of others. 

4. Differences in discipline and treatment of native 
Christians and employes, allowing them to pit one 
mission against the other. 

5. Differences in minor points of mission policy and 

118 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

method, such as self-support, education, etc., which 
are yet important, and which characterize missions. 

6. Insistence on divisive doctrines or practices, such 
as immersion, apostolic succession, Calvinism, Armin- 
ianism, etc. 

7. Lack of congeniality among men: personal re- 
moteness and incompatibility. It was just in the per- 
sonal intimacy of a few men that the secret of the 
Japanese Presbyterian Union lay. 

8. The unwillingness of the church and societies at 
home to have their work " swallowed up." 

But, after all, the great difficulty is our distance 
from Christ. As we come near him we shall learn 
how best to cooperate with all our brethren. It is 
fulness of life we want. Along the rocky shores of 
my native town of Marblehead one may see at low 
tide many little pools scattered among the rocks, each 
of them cut off from the others and shut up in its own 
petty basin, incrusted with shells and covered with 
sea-weed. The receding tide has left every pool thus 
isolated. But when the tide comes in it leaps over 
those walls which the pool could not surmount; it 
fills each to the brim; then it overflows, and finally 
buries all barriers beneath the inrushing and uprising 
flood. So it will be when the full tide of God's life 
rolls in upon churches and missions alike, and lifts 
them all above their petty divisions to a grand com- 
mon life, which is swayed by the currents that swing 
round the world. 

The Problem of Education. — In a preceding chapter 
I showed the natural development of the educational 
work of the mission; how, commencing as a rule 
simply in the interests of evangelization, the educa- 
tional work has grown to a vast system, often over- 
shadowing every other form of mission enterprise. 

119 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

It has not done this, however, without opposition, and 
forms to-day, both in its extent and in its kind, one 
of the greatest of mission problems. 

It is said, on the one hand, that this vast school 
system finds no precedent in apostolic missions; that 
it is comparatively fruitless, so far as conversions go; 
that it is most expensive work ; that in its higher and 
English forms it too often denationalizes students, un- 
fitting them for their home-life, leaving them at once 
dissatisfied with small things and incompetent for 
great things; that it diverts the best energies of the 
mission from the proper field of evangelistic effort 
and secularizes the teachers; that Christ sent his dis- 
ciples forth to teach the gospel, not to teach science; 
and, finally, that it is a misuse of consecrated funds 
and a degrading of the ministerial office. 

Forcible replies are made to every one of these ob- 
jections. The apostles did hot teach schools for one 
reason — because they neither needed nor were gen- 
rally qualified to do it, Christianity usually standing 
on a lower level of culture than those it evangelized. 
But they had the compensating power of working mir- 
acles to bear witness to their apostleship. In China, 
science discharges a similar office for the missionary 
to-day that miracles did then. The fruitlessness of 
schools is not greater, it is claimed, than that of much 
other work. Evangelizing is often carried on for 
years with no apparent result. The best men and the 
leaders of the Christian church are more and more 
the graduates of mission schools and colleges. Nor 
need the expense be great. In China the average cost 
of a common day scholar is $3.50 a year. 

Denationalizing effects are partly admitted, being 
regarded as inevitable, and partly denied. Bishop 
Caldwell finds his English-trained men willing to 

120 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

work in any of the villages of Tinnevelly. The only 
way to a higher nationality lies, it is claimed, through 
this very path. Finally, if school work justifies itself 
by results, it is neither a diversion of energies, a mis- 
use of funds, nor a degradation of the ministry. The 
same work is done for the same purposes at home, 
where millions of consecrated funds are employed in 
Christian education, where nine-tenths of American 
college presidents and three- fourths of their professors 
are ministers. 

But the educationists are not content simply to reply 
to objections. They are an aggressive body, and make 
much larger claims for their work. Women and chil- 
dren can seldom be reached except by schools, and 
the mission must found, as it has founded, an extensive 
system of zenana and higher female education. That 
missions have given the great impulse to woman's 
education in all mission fields, and so to the elevation 
of womanhood, there can be absolutely no question. 
We might well be content to let the whole mission 
cause stand or fall by the value of that work. The 
home rather than the temple is the citadel of heathen- 
ism. And schools for women and children are among 
the most potent influences for breaking into this home 
and lifting it out of its degradation. The converts of 
mission colleges may be few, but they are men of mark 
— among them such as Narayan Sheshadri, through 
whose instrumentality 2000 souls of the Mango were 
converted. It is also found that education is one of 
the most effective means of evangelizing all classes 
whom it reaches, quite apart from its importance in 
training up Christian teachers and ministers. 

But there is another plea of the educationist, which 
is, perhaps, the strongest argument of those who de- 
mand not only vernacular schools for Christians, but 

121 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

a complete educational system for all. The claim is 
made that there is no preparatory agent which is so 
efficient as education, and that it is because of this 
indirect work mainly that it must be pushed to such 
a high pitch of development. God used many long 
processes to prepare both the Jewish and the Gentile 
world for the entrance of the gospel, and it was due 
to this preliminary work that its success was so speedy. 
He has brought about among us a marvellous develop- 
ment of universal scientific knowledge at the same 
time that he has opened wide the doors of the world 
as the sphere in which we are to use that knowledge 
for his kingdom. Education in all these branches is 
at once the key to hearts still closed by prejudice and 
bigotry, and the universal solvent of pagan systems 
— " the quinine for the cure of India's fever," as a 
Hindu pleader put it. It at once disintegrates the 
old superstitious mythologies and idolatries, and pre- 
pares the way for the understanding of the new truth. 
Almost all the intercourse which the missionaries in 
China have with natives of the higher classes is de- 
pendent on the fact that they understand western 
science and are qualified to teach or practise it. The 
native day-schools in every city, town, and hamlet, it 
is said, are the great means for imparting and main- 
taining the Confucian system. These teachers are the 
chief upholders of heathenism in China. The schools 
are a drill in heathenism. A Berlin missionary once 
introduced Christian teaching into 138 such schools, 
with 1500 scholars, in the province of Kwang-tung. 
If this be continued, what an effect it must produce! 
Occupy such schools and teach those teachers, and the 
whole land is being prepared. 

To the objection that all this is very slow, discourag- 
ing work the apt quotation is made from Archbishop 

122 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

Whately : " The man that is in a hurry to see the full 
effects of his tillage must cultivate annuals and not 
forest trees." If God took so long a time to prepare 
the world before the times were ripe for Christ, we 
need not think a few decades long for preparing India 
and China. Besides which, if we do not teach science 
and all the higher branches, others hostile or indif- 
ferent to Christianity will do so, with the result of a 
cultured scepticism. And if we teach only the few 
preachers and teachers, neglecting the masses, we shall 
build up the worst kind of priestocracy. 

The arguments for a broad, full educational system, 
it will be seen, are strong. It must be remembered 
that the office of missionary is far more comprehensive 
than that of home pastor. He is the sole representative 
of Christianity in all its functions, agencies, and devel- 
opments. We must learn also to judge every branch 
of the mission work, not simply by what it is for it- 
self, but quite as much by what it is and does in co- 
operation with other branches. It is not a congeries 
of detached and spasmodic efforts, but an organic 
whole, and it must be judged as a whole. It lays the 
ten fingers of its two hands upon the heathen body, 
seeking by their combined action to tear away the rags 
of heathenism, cleanse the foul form, and clothe it 
with the pure robes of Christ's righteousness. Every 
department has its share. The part of education is 
quite beyond computation. 

When all this has been said, certain dangers remain 
which must be carefully guarded against. School 
work does tend to draw men from evangelistic work, 
especially in great cities. The consequent neglect of 
that department is greatly to be deplored. That there 
is also a frequent secularization of the teaching mis- 
sionary cannot be denied, especially if men are selected 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

at home for their teaching gifts rather than for their 
missionary zeal. It is most important that an evan- 
gelistic spirit should characterize the mission schools, 
and, for this and other reasons, it is well if every 
teacher be expected to give a part of each year to 
direct evangelistic labor among the heathen. If souls 
are being continually converted in the schools, there 
is no doubt that they will be converted in the cities 
and the villages. 

The Problem of the Native Church. — The central 
problem of all others is that of the Native Church. 
It is, in fact, a cluster of problems, most of which 
can be wrought out only by experience. To consider 
them will take us right into the heart of the mis- 
sion work. 

1. There is the question of accessions to the native 
church. What shall be the treatment of inquirers 
and converts? What arguments and inducements 
shall be used, what help rendered, what standard im- 
posed ? 

2. The question of the ministry of the native church. 
Who shall manage the training, employment, and pay 
of all the native agents? 

3. The question of the independence of the native 
church, its self-government and self-support, as con- 
trasted with the use of foreign authority and foreign 
money. Shall ecclesiastical independence and union 
precede or follow financial independence? 

4. The question of the organization of the native 
church. What shall be its polity, its creed, and its 
relation to other churches? What the ecclesiastical 
place and function of the missionaries? 

As to the treatment of converts and inquirers, the 
experienced missionary knows that the motives of not 
a few who come to him are mingled. " It is a mon- 

124 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

grel mixture of faith and hope that influences many 
of them," said Dr. Scudder, at Allahabad — " faith 
that Christianity is in all points superior to the relig- 
ions about them, and hope that it will bring them into 
a condition of prosperity and influence above that of 
their heathen neighbors." 

" The accessions to Christianity in Tinnevelly," re- 
marked a missionary from that district at the same 
conference, " have not generally been the direct result 
of the preaching of the gospel either by Europeans 
or natives. The hope of being benefited in some way 
or other has, in very many instances, been the in- 
fluencing motive with the simple people who attached 
themselves to the missionaries." The same testimony 
comes from men in all lands. Not that many of these 
converts will be strictly what is called nee-Christians ; 
for in ordinary times, certainly, the mission will take 
care to discourage expectation of alms on the part of 
inquirers. But there may be hope of protection from 
oppressive landlords and others, hope of help in law- 
suits, or of employment and education. Or still more 
generally there may be a vague hope of benefit from 
linking themselves to what seems a stronger, and, 
perhaps, better cause, especially in times of famine, 
flood, sickness, or trouble of any sort. Now, shall 
such classes be sent back into heathenism? If not, 
what shall be done with them? Anything is better 
than turning heathens into Pharisees. 

I know of nothing better than what was written by 
Bishop Caldwell a few years ago. He says : " I can- 
not imagine any person who has lived . and worked 
amongst uneducated heathens in the rural districts be- 
lieving them to be influenced by high motives in any- 
thing they do. They have never heard of such things 
as high motives, and they cannot for a long time be 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

made to comprehend what high motives mean. An 
inquiry into their motives, with a view of ascertaining 
whether they are spiritual or not, will seem to them 
like an inquiry into their acquaintance with Greek or 
algebra. They will learn what good motives mean, 
I trust, in time — and, perhaps, high motives, too — 
if they remain long enough under Christian teaching 
and discipline; but till they discard heathenism, with 
its debasing idolatries and superstitions, and place 
themselves under the wings of the church, there is not 
the slightest chance, as it appears to me, of their mo- 
tives becoming better than they are. The only hope 
for them lies in their admission as soon as possible 
into Christ's school. Whatever the motive, provided 
it is not sordid or disgraceful, we receive them." 

In accordance with this sentiment, the marks of what 
is called the Tinnevelly system, which has been sub- 
stantially adopted in the Madura and Arcot missions, 
are education and discipline. When a group of people, 
say three families, are ready to abjure idolatry and be 
taught by Christians, they are formed into what is 
called a Christian congregation. They must promise 
to abandon idolatry, to worship the true God, to ob- 
serve the Sabbath, to abstain from the use of flesh 
that has died of itself, and to give up all caste distinc- 
tions. 

The Arcot Mission, and, I presume, the Madura, 
requires abstinence from intoxicating drink. The Arcot 
also requires the removal of the kudiimi, or tuft of hair 
on the crown of the head, which they regard as a re- 
ligious badge. Thus, having come over to the Chris- 
tians, they are supplied with a catechist, who instructs 
them, and are disciplined into the observance of what 
they have undertaken. Slowly the truth gets hold of 
some of them, who are then baptized, and, after a few 

126 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

years, perhaps, a church is formed. One of the great- 
est difficulties is with caste distinctions, which keep 
springing up like the heads of the hydra, even showing 
themselves at the Lord's table. Finding that the high- 
caste men tried to seat themselves in front, so that the 
bread and the cup should be first passed while un- 
touched to them, the Madura Mission simply made the 
rule that the order should be reversed in the distribu- 
tion of the elements, the one beginning in front, the 
other in the rear, by which the first were made last, the 
last first. 

In the Arcot Mission great pains are taken to secure 
intermarriage between the castes. This education of 
the new-made, perhaps yet unregenerate, converts is 
a slow, painful process, with many a relapse for them 
and heartache for the missionary. Yet every year it 
brings them more into the light. One difficulty is that 
the missionary or catechist often stands too much in 
the way of the convert. As one has put it, " He cannot 
see beyond the mission-house and the mission treasury. 
The missionary is a little providence to him. The am- 
bassador has taken the place of the king." It is hard 
to avoid this ; yet it should be carefully guarded against. 

But at every step of this upward way there arise 
problems which can be solved only by that sanctified 
common-sense which ought to be the possession of 
every missionary. All his experience will teach him 
that, as one has said, " there is both endogenous and 
exogenous growth in the church " — development from 
within, accretion from without. There is room for both 
in the spiritual as in the vegetable kingdom. 

The questions concerning the native ministry are 
still more difficult. John Newton once said : " Only 
he who made the worlds can make a minister of the 
gospel." If that is true of students in Christian lands, 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

how much more so of one saturated with the heathen- 
ism of China and India! Yet it is just such men or 
their children whom the missionary is trying to train 
up to that sacred office. In this class are included 
Bible readers, male and female, catechists, evangelists, 
and pastors — all, in fact, who are in any way to make 
it their calling to serve the church. 

The usual method has been to select the most hope- 
ful boys at school and train them specially for the 
work, partly or wholly at the expense of the mission. 
But the results are far from satisfactory. The brightest 
of such men are easily enticed away from a calling 
which they have not adopted from a mature and dis- 
interested choice. Those who remain too often labor 
in a perfunctory spirit, caring more for employment 
than for conversions. Having begun as mission stu- 
dents, they would end in being mission agents — the 
missionaries' " hired men." Even when pastors, they 
are too apt to be simply subservient to the missionary. 

For all these reasons it is growing more common to 
give a broad training to many men, and to depend 
upon the personal call to the ministry, as in this 
country. Yet some noble men have been trained in 
the old way. At present our mission colleges supply 
a certain quota to the theological class, while workers 
of a simpler grade are called in as catechists from the 
lower schools. 

In connection with these educating processes, such 
questions arise as: Shall they be trained in the ver- 
nacular only, or shall they also be taught the English 
language? and how far shall their English training 
be carried ? What use, if any, shall be made of Latin, 
Greek, or Hebrew? How far shall they be taught 
their own classics and religious books? Shall they 
study privately with a missionary or be gathered into 

128 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

a theological class or seminary? How shall their fit- 
ness for the highest training be tested? How shall 
the theory and practice of the work be combined? 
Shall any of them be encouraged to complete their 
education in Europe or America? In regard to all 
these points, I can only say that there is need in 
every country of a few men of the very highest gifts 
and training, though the latter should be given so far 
as possible in their own land. A great number of men 
are needed of plain biblical vernacular training, of 
simple habits and moderate expectations, who can live 
among their own people, and be supported by them. 
The greatest care must be taken not to denationalize 
the native ministry — something only too easy in 
India, in spite of the resistance of missionaries. 

The question of the employment and payment of 
these men by the mission is one of greatest difficulty. 
It touches at once moral subservience and dissatisfac- 
tion, if not rebellion. The missionary becomes a pay- 
master, and one whose resources are supposed to be 
unlimited. Yet, as he must cut the wages down to 
the lowest notch, constant complaints are heard, until 
bitterness is engendered among the mission helpers. 
This is by no means always, though it is often, the 
case. I know of no way in which the evil can be 
more than alleviated. The fault lies in the system. 

That appears more clearly when we take up the 
problem of the independence of the native church. 
It seems to lie in the very principles of a church 
that it should be independent and expansive, self- 
supporting, self-governing, and self-propagating. Any- 
thing different should be of an exceptional and tem- 
porary character. The church should be at least 
founded on those principles and always moving to- 
wards them. Yet it must be confessed that a large 

129 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

part of our mission work does not rest on this basis 
of the independence of the native church, or even 
move towards it. Another large part, I am happy 
to say, is mainly based on that principle, and always 
striving to attain that end. The whole Japanese mis- 
sion with the American Board at the head, some 
work in China of the Presbyterians, the Church Mis- 
sionary Society and others, all the Church Missionary 
Society work in India, the American Board work 
there, the Baptist work in Burma, the Harpoot Mis- 
sion and the United Presbyterian work in Egypt — 
all these occur to me as excellent instances of work 
along the true line of an independent church. But 
there has been, on the whole, a great failure to at- 
tack the problem at the right point and aim straight 
for this independence of the native church. Many 
causes have conspired to prevent this. Among these 
are : ( I ) The necessary inexperience of the early mis- 
sionaries; (2) the failure to see that the aim of mis- 
sion work is not simply the conversion of souls, but the 
founding of the native church; (3) an exaggerated 
estimate of the poverty of the people and of the diffi- 
culty of their supporting their religious leaders; (4) 
the unconscious growth, in some cases, of a spirit of 
domination, which leads the mission too often to exalt 
itself above the native church. The language of the 
mission to the church and of the missionary to the 
native pastor should be the language of John the 
Baptist to Jesus, " Thou must increase, but I must 
decrease." The rare quality of self-effacement is re- 
quired to do this; but that is a requisite for the mis- 
sionary. " He that loseth his life shall find it." 

Despite many instances of generosity, I think it 
could be shown that the native Christians, in most 
cases, do not contribute as much in proportion to the 

130 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

gospel as the heathen contribute to their false religions. 
There are two reasons for this. The first is that from 
the start they lean on the missionaries, and cease to 
think it a duty to give, whereas heathenism exacts a 
fee or an offering for everything. The second reason 
is that in the heathen doctrine of righteousness the 
idea of merit is connected with giving in a way which 
is not permitted in evangelical Christianity. A Hindu 
or Buddhist heaps up merit by every one of his bene- 
factions as a permanent gain for eternity, whereas 
Christianity allows no merit to the deed disjoined from 
the motive. The appeal of heathenism is, for both 
of these reasons, stronger than that of Christianity, 
until the convert grows to maturity and is inflamed 
with generous love. 

It is true that in many cases the poverty of the peo- 
ple is intensified by their avowal of Christianity, which 
strips them of everything; yet in the course of a few 
years the condition of a Christian community is usu- 
ally bettered, while the spirit of giving does not always 
increase in proportion. Then, too, the old system of 
largely using foreign money is apt to enlist the native 
agent against independence. How can a man who re- 
ceives nine dollars a month from the mission be 
expected to advocate a self-supporting church which 
could give him at best but six dollars a month, with 
greater labors, increased trials, and much uncertainty? 
In the American Board Mission in Foo-chow, some 
years ago, a man whom all judged fit to be pastor 
refused to be ordained. The whole reason was that he 
had formerly taught that all contributions were a mat- 
ter of charity; therefore he did not dare to say to the 
native church, " You must give me my support.'' In 
the same place, however, connected with the Methodist 
Mission, was a pastor, Sia Sek Ong, who at an annual 

131 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

meeting in 1871 declared that he was hindered in his 
work by the oft-reiterated charge of " eating the for- 
eigners' rice and speaking the foreigners' words," and 
that he had resolved he would not thereafter receive 
a dollar of foreign money, but would trust to native 
support. 

Foreign authority, as well as foreign money, has 
hindered the independence of the native church — 
often with benefit, it is true; for there is great need 
of guidance and restraint. But among a dependent 
people it is hard to know where to check authority and 
develop self-respect and self-control. 

Of all these difficulties and mistakes, there are no 
keener critics than missionaries themselves. Yet it is 
exceedingly hard for those who are bound up in such 
a system to reform that which they criticise. Hence 
it is often the duty of the Home Board to interfere, 
and give the missionaries not only authority, but in- 
structions for changes, however painful they may be. 

I think it important in this connection to state how 
the Church Missionary Society meets this problem of 
independence and organization at once. The plan is 
carried out in India, China, Japan, and other countries, 
and has shown itself most efficient. Every church has 
a native church committee, consisting of the pastor as 
chairman and at least three lay communicants. Not 
more than one-third of the laymen may be paid agents 
of the society or of the native church. This committee 
has charge of local affairs. Next above it is a district 
native church council, consisting of two lay delegates 
from each qualified church committee, of all the native 
clergy in connection with the council, and a chairman, 
usually a missionary, who has a veto on all proceed- 
ings. This council receives the funds of all the church 
committees and all other funds, and disburses from 

132 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

them the salaries of native pastors and other agents. 
It also makes grants for erection or repair of churches 
and houses. It sends in to the parent society the esti- 
mates of expenses, receives reports of all work, devel- 
ops voluntary work, settles all salaries and allowances, 
and recommends new pastorates. When necessary 
there is a provincial council, similarly constituted by 
representation from the district councils. Here, then, 
is a complete system of native government. The mis- 
sionary force is sufficiently represented by the chair- 
man with veto power. All the rest develops the native 
church. Grants-in-aid are made to complete the 
amounts raised by these councils, but these grants are 
diminished a certain per cent, every year. 

There are some points settled by experience, which 
may be called axioms in the science of missions. 
Though they now seem perfectly obvious, they were 
not so at first, and have been reached only through 
years of struggle and frequent failure. 

1. The native church in each country should be or- 
ganized as a distinct church, ecclesiastically independ- 
ent of the church in any other country. 

2. The pastorate of the native church should be a 
native pastorate. Whatever else the missionary is, he 
should not be pastor. 

3. The principles of self-control, self-help, and self- 
extension should be recognized in the very organiza- 
tion of the church. To postpone them to days of 
strength is to postpone both strength and blessing. 

But in organizing the native church thus independ- 
ently, what form shall be given to it? What shall be 
its polity f 

It is natural that every missionary society should 
think its own form of government the best, and should 
proceed to shape the native church after the same pat- 

i33 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

tern. It must have some form. The natives are not 
yet competent to devise their own form. What else 
can be done? Presbyterian societies will form Pres- 
byterian churches; Methodist societies, Methodist 
churches, etc. But there are certain things which 
should not be done. These are : 

1. No purely local or historical features should be 
introduced into the constitution of the new churches. 
Think of the absurdity of requiring native converts at 
Calcutta to assent to the principles contained in the 
Deed of Demission in 1843 °f the Free Church of 
Scotland. On the other hand, regard should be had 
to the local peculiarities of the people, utilizing rather 
than antagonizing national traits. More or less ritual 
may seem required in different countries, and a greater 
or less degree of authority. 

2. The first organization given a native church can- 
not well be anything more than tentative. As the 
church develops it will choose its own form and make 
its own changes ; therefore, 

3. No unnecessary obstacles should be laid in the 
way of the union of native Christians on an evangelical 
basis. In the beginning, before the new communities 
have crystallized, it will be easy for them to flow to- 
gether. Later on the process will be more difficult. 

4. As to creeds, loyalty and simplicity are the only 
rules. 

In short, the native church must be an oriental 
church — an Indian, Chinese, Japanese church. We 
must not, cannot, denationalize, occidentalize it into 
European forms, which would be alien and destructive 
to it. Yet something of the counteracting occidental 
elements must be infused into the blood of the church 
if we would not have it die of orientalism. The hardy 
tenacity of the West should be used to tone up the 

134 






THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

more dependent and flexible oriental. The fault of 
the Indian convert is weakness of character; that of 
the Chinese convert, weakness of piety. Each of these 
should be counterbalanced by some special gift from 
the West. How is this to be done? Not, it seems to 
me, by expecting the young and immature churches to 
accept our formulated western creeds or go much be- 
yond the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds. We shall do 
most by our training of the native ministry. They are 
the men who will form the faith of the church. If 
few minds of theological originality or independence 
have as yet appeared among them it is not strange. 
All the results of nineteen centuries of occidental de- 
velopment are presented to them in a few lessons. It 
is simply overwhelming. What else can they do for 
a long time than try to grasp it? The memory is the 
universal talent in the East. Fancy, too, is active ; but 
thought is rare. They are still childish races. Since 
they are thus plastic under our hands, we must be the 
more careful not to fetter but to free them. Biblican 
theology, history of doctrine, should be carefully 
taught. The knowledge of our conflicts with Ebionit- 
ism and Gnosticism, Arianism and Socinianism, Pela- 
gianism and Manicheism, with Deism and Pantheism, 
will prepare them for their coming conflicts. Some 
profit must accrue to them from the experience, er- 
rors, and victories of the western as well as from the 
defeats of the eastern churches. 

Yet they must have their own experience, fight their 
own battles, and gain their own spoils. The new up- 
springing oriental churches cannot always be held in 
leading-strings, even at the risk of error. Our weap- 
ons of defence and offence will often prove but Saul's 
armor to the stripling church. Nor must we fear to 
see this young David go out to meet giant Error, even 

135 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

though he seem armed with only a sling. The Lord, 
who has already delivered the native church out of 
the paw of the lion Paganism, may be trusted to give 
it the victory over Goliath Error and Philistine Schism. 
We may perhaps furnish the sling — the slender out- 
line of thought; they must themselves pick up the 
stone from their native brooks. Other churches be- 
sides the young Japanese United Church will doubt- 
less pledge respect rather than adhesion to our great 
confessions. Their spiritual debt to us must be im- 
mense in any case, but the sum of it will be, not that 
we have infused them with our isms, but that we have 
inspired them with Christ, and brought them back to 
those oriental sources and streams from which our 
western currents have flowed. Surely Confucius and 
Buddha may be expected to have as great formative 
influence upon oriental theology, so soon as the in- 
grafted truth begins to have its own development, as 
Plato and Aristotle have always exercised upon west- 
ern theologies. It is in this way that the oriental orig- 
inal contributions to theology will be some day joined 
to the contributions of the Occident to form that ripe 
and genuine theosophy which will embody the complete 
experience of the truly apostolic and catholic church. 
In regard to the polity of the Indian church, the 
Church Missionary Society, five years ago, passed the 
following suggestive resolution : " The society depre- 
cates any measures of church organization which may 
tend permanently to subject the native Christian com- 
munities in India to the forms and arrangements of 
the national and established church of a far distant 
and very different country, and therefore desires that 
all present arrangements for church organization 
should remain as elastic as possible, until the native 
Christians themselves shall be numerous and powerful 

136 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

enough to have a dominant voice in the formation of 
an ecclesiastical constitution on lines suitable to the 
Indian people — a constitution which the society trusts 
will, while maintaining full communion with the 
Church of England, be such as to promote the unity of 
Indian Christendom." 

And for the contribution of Christian graces which 
we may expect from the Indian church, and will form 
the basis of all contributions of thought, I will quote 
from the Rev. Dr. Kay : " The catholic church cannot 
attain to its proper normal condition in any part till it 
has embraced within itself the whole range of human- 
ity. Every nation has its contribution of moral quali- 
ties to give to the catholic church. I am persuaded 
that the view which makes the Greek, Latin, and 
Gothic races to have exhausted all that is of essential 
importance to the habilitation of humanity is a pro- 
found error. I believe that the Hindu, for instance, 
has many noble qualities — lofty idealism, singular 
strength of self-devotion, marvellous power of endur- 
ance — along with natural aptitude for many of the 
gentler virtues, which we may not rank very high, but 
on which our Savior has stamped his indelible appro- 
bation in the Sermon on the Mount. These virtues 
and others akin to them, such as patience and tem- 
perance, seem peculiarly calculated to find exceptional 
development in such a church as we may find taking 
the place of the present dark superstitions of India." 

In regard to the future of the native church, the 
great need is life from on high. While there are noble 
examples of Christian piety, and while great imma- 
turity both of thought and character must be expected, 
there is by no means that zeal for extending the gospel 
which we might hope for. There is sometimes mani- 
fest the disposition to keep to themselves the advan- 

137 



INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

tages of their new position. The children of the first 
and second generations are often only what might be 
expected, seeing that they grow up in the midst of 
heathen surroundings, where we would not dare to 
trust our own children. 

The great problem, how to preserve and revive the 
life of the native church, is to be answered only by 
prayer — by ourselves receiving a higher life and shar- 
ing it with them until the gift is directly communicated 
to them, and imparted in turn from them to us. 

There are many other problems of every variety 
which press on the mind of the missionary. There are 
literary questions of greatest importance in translation 
and composition. What terms shall be used for God, 
for Baptism, for Sin, and many other words? What 
shall be the style used — classic or popular? Shall 
the translation be free and idiomatic, or exact and lit- 
eral ? Shall familiar terms having evil associations be 
regenerated, or new terms be introduced? Shall the 
Bible societies circulate Bibles as now demanded in 
China, with notes and comments, or adhere to their 
old rule, " The Bible without note or comment?" 

There are doctrinal questions, such as the relation of 
our eschatology to the doctrine of metempsychosis, to 
the worship of dead ancestors, and to other oriental 
speculations; the relation of the Christian doctrine of 
incarnation to Hindu and Buddhist incarnations. 

There are ethical problems of great importance and 
difficulty. What shall be the treatment of polygamous 
converts? What the standard of life and character 
demanded of the native converts, especially the native 
agents ? Is secret baptism ever to be allowed ? Should 
baptism follow instantly upon confession? How util- 
ize the filial piety manifested in ancestor worship 
without encouraging idolatry? 

138 



THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

There are practical questions, such as, Has asceti- 
cism any place in mission labor? Shall celibate broth- 
erhoods be organized and employed? What use can 
be made of lay evangelists? Should offers of service 
for a limited time be sought or received ? How secure 
support for destitute Christians who have become im- 
poverished through their adherence to Christ? How 
help and not harm them, sustain and not pauperize? 
Shall they be gathered in a separate Christian com- 
munity clustering around the mission-house? or shall 
they be sent back to endure hardship and temptation 
in their native villages? How far shall they be as- 
sisted in their lawsuits in defence of their rights? 
Shall the tithing system be made practically compul- 
sory among mission agents? 

There are also special problems in Turkish domin- 
ions touching the relations of the work to the old, cor- 
rupt Christian churches — the Coptic, Syrian, Gre- 
gorian, Greek, etc. But these lie outside the limits of 
this discussion, and can here be only referred to. 

It is a great point gained to know of the existence of 
problems of this character. It is another advance if 
we can simply put in the correct way the question that 
is to be answered. My object in presenting these prob- 
lems is secured if the reader is led to an increased 
sense of the claim a work full of such peculiar per- 
plexities has on the very best preparation, wisdom, 
heroism, and consecration that Christendom can fur- 
nish. The very cream of our institutions, the flower 
of our young manhood, the service of our whole 
lives — these are none too much for a work whose 
dignity is just in proportion to its difficulty, whose 
joy and reward is measured by its demands on the best 
we have to give. 

I. Wanted — A lectureship or professorship of mis- 
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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

sionics in every theological seminary. We should as- 
sume that some of the graduates of these institutions 
will go abroad and should be trained for that purpose, 
while all should be trained to intelligent cooperation 
and sympathy. 

2. Wanted — The discussion of mission topics and 
problems at our ministerial and ecclesiastical gather- 
ings. If the mission work is at once the most arduous 
and glorious of enterprises, and one of the deepest and 
broadest of sciences, it should take its proper place in 
the consideration of the church at home. No theme 
presented at our associations and conferences can sur- 
pass it in interest and fruitfulness. We listen to many 
stirring appeals from secretaries; we are kept in- 
formed as to certain features of the work. But it is 
all too much like the kodak prescription, " You press 
the button, we do the rest." " You contribute, we do 
the rest." Whereas if heart, intellect, conscience be 
alike aroused by the serious study of the work, and 
of God's providence and purpose in it, both means and 
men would be forthcoming in abundance. 

3. Wanted — Direct participation by the churches 
in the administration of the mission work. Volunteer 
societies and close corporations are often a necessary 
makeshift when the church is not as yet awake to its 
privileges. But the true mission society is the church 
itself, and everything else should only prepare for the 
time when the church shall administer its great enter- 
prise. Various methods of securing this participation 
are practicable. I do not undertake to specify them; 
I only emphasize the need. For both the expression 
and the creation of the mission sentiment in the church, 
for the enlargement and improvement of the mission 
work abroad, one of the most important wants is that 
the church should representatively administrate. 

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THE PROBLEM OF MISSIONS 

4. Wanted — A volunteer band to take possession 
of some district in China or India in the name of the 
Lord, just as such bands have labored in the founda- 
tion of Christian States in Illinois, Iowa, Dakota, and 
Washington. The first members of this band should 
begin work under the supervision of experienced mis- 
sionaries. They should be reinforced from year to 
year by fresh recruits. Men should be trained with 
reference to this special work and its needs. Men of 
the same institution at home should more and more 
assume the support of the whole field, until it becomes 
like the universities' missions in Africa and India. 
One of the greatest secrets of success is thorough 
compatibility and hearty friendship among coworkers. 
A large degree of this might be expected in such a 
mission. 

5. Wanted — Finally, a more robust and courageous 
faith in missions and in God and the church. From 
beginning to end this is an enterprise of faith. There 
is no other argument and evidence that will always 
and everywhere hold good save the evidence from the 
promises and the nature of God as revealed in our 
Lord the Christ. History, experience, statistics, rea- 
sonings, everything of this sort will at times seem to 
lose its convincing, sustaining power. If faith is not 
supreme we shall fail. 

But it must be a robust, courageous, manly faith — 
a faith that can see, declare, and endure the truth, 
whatever it may be; a faith that can discern all the 
hardships, difficulties, perplexities in the way, and be 
not only undeterred, but rather inspired thereby; that 
can acknowledge mistakes and admit failure where it 
has occurred, and then be strong and rich enough to 
utilize success when it comes with its added demands 
and responsibilities. 

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INTRODUCTION TO FOREIGN MISSIONS 

A timid, distrustful faith, that keeps back part of 
the facts lest the church should be discouraged; that 
will not imitate Christ by declaring the difficulties in 
the way lest men should be kept from following him; 
a faith more known for " judiciousness " than for 
courageousness — this can hardly be called a faith at 
all. It certainly is not the faith Christ expects from 
those he sends forth in his name. The gospel appeals 
to the heroism latent in every child of God; it stimu- 
lates by difficulty, it clarifies by perplexity, it thrusts 
men out upon divine grace through the sense it breeds 
of human need and weakness. A supreme faith in 
Christ, his gospel and his church, will lead volunteers 
to flock into the lists as men spring to a forlorn hope, 
where many may fall but the enterprise must succeed. 
Such a faith will insist on knowing the whole truth 
and will dare the worst. 

Let our societies and our churches have such faith, 
and they will trust one another more. Out of defeat 
will spring victory. The very acknowledgment of 
disaster when it comes will enlist recruits, and the men 
who thus enlist will be true soldiers of Jesus Christ. 

As I journeyed from station to station, from land to 
land, I was sometimes quite bewildered in the multi- 
plicity of detail seen in church after church, and school 
after school. But by degrees something emerged from 
all this detail which, as its proportions gradually re- 
vealed themselves, I saw to be the grandest thing my 
eyes had ever beheld. It was lovelier than the Taj 
Mahal, nobler than the Parthenon, more enduring than 
the pyramids. It was nothing less than the form of 
the universal kingdom of God springing up on earth, 
the New Jerusalem coming down from heaven. I 
came more and more to see how all men who are labor- 
ing anywhere, anyhow, for Christ, at home, abroad, in 

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THE PROBLEMS OF MISSIONS 

public, in secret, are building up this kingdom, are 
drawing down this holy city. If we yield obedience, 
God will utter the command and impart the wisdom. 
It is enough if the study of these world-problems may 
simply lead us to utter from the heart these two sen- 
tences : " That which I see not teach thou me." 
" That the excellency of the power may be of God." 



143 



BePt 27 1901 



SEP 14 1901 






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